Pubdate: Thu, 04 Jan 2001
Source: Monday Magazine (CN BC)
Copyright: 2001 Monday Publications
Contact:  818 Broughton St., Victoria, B.C. V8W 1E4
Fax: (250) 382-6188
Website: http://www.monday.com/
Author: Erik Davis
Note: Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in 
the Age of Information. He writes for the online magazine FEED, where this 
article originally appeared.

ADVENTURES THROUGH INNER SPACE

"Psychonauts" are experimenting with strange new drugs to expand our ideas 
about human consciousness

Let's say you're a buttoned-down organic-chemistry jockey at Merck. One day 
you tweak a molecule ripped off from a Peruvian native medicine, and you 
wind up with a powerfully psychoactive compound.

Instead of squelching anxiety, instilling a reliable boner, or giving young 
minds that magic amphetamine edge, the drug helps you touch the hem of God 
- - or, at least, something a lot like the hem of God.

At times it hurtles you into a blazing hieroglyphic phantasmagoria more 
sublime and gorgeously bizarre than anything on the demo reels of Hollywood 
FX shops.

On other occasions it leads you to the lip of a fundamental insight into 
the dance of form and emptiness.

And though later attempts to communicate your insight founder on the shoals 
of coherence, the experience still leaves you centred and convinced that 
ordinary life is fed by deeper springs.

Now, you think you'd zero in on this molecule, not only as a potential 
vector into the enigma of consciousness but as the basis for some really 
interesting commercial drugs.

In other words, you'd be psyched.

Right?

No way. It's common knowledge that such molecules have been recognized and 
consumed by people for millenia, but they've been effectively banished from 
the scientific mindscape of the West. Despite their mighty psycho-spiritual 
effects, the potential insight they might provide into the mind, and the 
largely non-addictive behaviours they elicit, psychedelic drugs like LSD, 
psilocybin, mescaline, ketamine, and DMT have been crudely lumped into the 
same legal and socio-cultural categories as speedballs and crank.

And one result of this social policy is a withering of the research 
strategies that a rational civilization is supposed to bring to bear on the 
conundrums it confronts.

Despite the continued ferocity of the "war on drugs" and the largely 
foolish ideas about psychoactive substances it pushes, the last decade has 
seen a small renaissance in psychedelic research, both above and 
underground. On the official stage, advocacy groups like MAPS (the 
Florida-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and 
the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as 
individual researchers, have all done their homework, balancing loopy 
subjective accounts with the dry, methodical language of protocols, 
pharmacology, and action studies.

These modest research reports are laying the groundwork for a resumption of 
the kind of official in-depth psychological studies squelched over 30 years 
ago.

Meanwhile, in the far margins of legality, small crews of brave, 
compulsive, and sometimes whacked-out individuals continue to compile and 
share fact, anecdote, and lore about exotic and new-fangled psychoactives 
and the even more exotic combinations they allow.

Think of these so-called "psychonauts" as hobbyist of neural R&D. They like 
to plunge as far as any hippie into the bejewelled halls of hyperspace, but 
they also bring an almost geeky spirit of investigation to their exploits. 
They know their chemistry, and understand that the envelope of psychedelic 
pharmacology is pushed by recombining existing molecular Tinkertoys. They 
also take this recombinant logic a step further by mixing and matching 
different drugs from an ever-widening pharmacopoeia in order to craft new 
highs.

Even veterans of the Burning Man festival may not have heard of many of the 
esoteric compounds that float around the scene: AMT, 5-MEO-DMT, 2CT-2, 
2CT-7, 5-MEO-DIPT, 4-Acetoxy-DIPT, DPT, DOB, 2CB. With a few exceptions, 
these white powders have largely resisted being branded with cool names.

Some have been known for decades, others are relatively new; a few have 
been scheduled, but many have so far been overlooked by police agencies and 
remain uncontrolled. However, because the vast majority of these substances 
are chemically similar to illegal drugs, in the U.S. people gobbling them 
can technically be snagged under the Federal Analog Act, which allows 
individuals to be prosecuted for recreational use of drugs that are 
"substantially similar" to scheduled drugs. But this rarely seems to 
happen, especially given the obscurity of many of these drugs and the 
difficulties involved in proving "substantial" similarity.

It's impossible to say how many grams of these compounds are being 
synthesized and consumed annually, but there's probably morsels of intrigue 
all over Europe and America. Though some demand complex procedures and 
elusive precursors to synthesize, the lion's share can be cooked up by most 
anyone with undergrad training in chemistry and access to a lab. There's 
really nothing to stop curious amateur organic chemists from brewing up a 
small batch of AMT or 2-CB in a weekend to share with a small circle of 
friends, and anecdotal evidence indicates that many do. Some of these 
modern alchemists even exploit the grey-market status of these compounds by 
marketing them for non-human "research purposes" over the Internet.

The back-room circulation of these drugs has engendered a loose-knit and 
rather hermetic psychedelic scene devoted less to partying or cosmic 
communion than to a kind of weird science, where the purple haze is 
filtered through a knowledge and respect for methyl groups, monoamine 
oxidase inhibitors, and the value of keeping your eye on the clock.

The godfather of this particular psychedelic style is Alexander Shulgin, a 
cheery, eccentric San Francisco-area chemist best known for the rediscovery 
of MDMA. With his wife, Ann, he wrote PIHKAL and TIHKAL, two phone-book 
size tomes devoted, respectively, to phenethylamines and tryptamines, the 
two pillars of psychedelic pharmacology. Though Shulgin once had a license 
to study scheduled drugs, an irritated U.S. Drug Enforcement Ageny 
responded to the publication of PIHKAL by swooping down on Shulgi's grubby 
lab and slapping him with 51 violations they then effectively swapped for 
his license.

In reaction, Shulgin simply continued to devote himself to the art of 
recombination that characterizes the synthesis of novel molecules. "Once 
they schedule something, I throw away my samples and continue my research 
in another direction," he says.

The creator of 2C-B and 2CT-7, two drugs popular among psychonauts, Shulgin 
has described, synthesized, and analyzed scores of substances whose 
potential for thrills and profit remain untapped.

Many of the hundreds of compounds described in PIHKAL and TIHKAL are duds; 
others are actively unfun. 2C-B, on the other hand, has gained quite a 
following for its electric visuals and mescaline-like effects, while the 
more esoteric 2CT-7 can unleash a hyperactive barrage of 3-D psychedelic 
imagery that can take some users to the edge of delirium.

Dosage, of course matters greatly, but dosages are by nature provisional in 
this scene - one psychonaut recently died after snorting an ungodly amount 
of 2CT-7. Still, even at the right amounts, it could turn out that nothing 
in the Shulgin universe will ever match the depth of LSD, mushrooms, or 
DMT. But the genie is out of the bottle. "I find postings about compounds 
that are slipped away in little corners of my books," says Shulgin. "And 
all of a sudden they are commercially available and people are talking 
about them. The seeds are all in there."

To no one's surprise, the weird scientists have embraced the Internet, 
which links the gossamer strands of data and debate necessary to support a 
shadowy and fragmented community that needs to stay informed.

Sites like the Vaults of Erowid (www.erowid.org) and the Lycaeum 
(www.lycaeum.org) provide loads of information on dosages, chemistry, legal 
status, effects, and, perhaps most importantly, experiential feedback.

The problem is that such public information also runs the risk of killing 
the scene, especially when kids get into the act. "The more people know 
about what's going on, the more likely somebody is to come in and try to 
squash it," explains Scotto, one of the more balls-out contributors to 
Erowid's growing vault of reports.

At the same time, the persistent curiosity of psychonauts and the endless 
potential for pharmacological novelty may have created a perpetually 
expanding zone of grey-market psychedelia. "Humans are going to keep 
inventing these things faster than the government's going to make them 
illegal," says Scotto, pointing out that the efflorescence of esoteric 
synthetic compounds mocks the "logic" of the ware on drugs. "Are we going 
to reach the point where I can be imprisoned for doing 20 milligrams of 
4-acetoxy diisopropyltryptamine in my bathtub, when nobody even knows what 
that fucking is? What kind of culture is that?"

I'll tell you what kind of culture that is: a post-human one.

This might seem like a tall claim.

After all, if you take a random slice of human history, you can pretty much 
bank on the existence of some popular and dependable pharmacological route 
toward altered states of consciousness, whether through snuff, brews, bark, 
or herbs.

What makes the coming drug culture truly post-human is the historically 
novel conjuction of our expanding knowledge of psychopharmacology, the 
growing dominance of reductionist accounts of the mind, and a consumer 
culture increasingly focused on what some have called the "experience economy."

According to Earch, who runs the Vaults of Erowid with his 
also-psuedonymous partner Fire, we ain't seen nothin' yet. "In the next 50 
years, virtually everyone in developed countries will be faced with daily 
decisions about their psychoactive drug use," he says. He arguesthat the 
number of psychoactive chemicals in our midst is about to explode, the work 
not so much of underground drug designers as of pharmaceutical companies. 
"Imagine a thousand caffeine replacements," says Earth. "Myriad 
amphetamines, though less fun than ones today.

Or, like Viagra, a coming class of psuedo-medicinal recreational drugs."

The signs of this emerging culture are around us. Just ask subway and train 
riders across the U.S. what time it is, and they'll tell you: "It's 
Prilosec time!" The garish $50-million direct-to-consumer ad campaign for 
the "little purple pill" is a remarkable indication of the shift toward a 
mainstream embrace of psychoactive enhancement. Though you can't generally 
tell from the ads, the drug itself is indicated for nothing more 
interesting than heartburn.

But the marketing machine presents Prilosec as a lifestyle drug, a kind of 
luxurious soma, floating against azure skies.

Look at the connotations: the "little pill" is a microdot, the color a 
purple haze, and the image of the witchy New Age blonde exulting before the 
clock an ambiguous symbol of the slice of eternity that the greatest 
psychoactives promise - Eliot's "intersection of the timeless with time", 
hovering over hasty commuters.

Ordinary drugs can promise such magic in part because we have so thoroughly 
adoped the notion that our subjective experience is largely, if not 
exclusively, a products of the activity of neural tissue.

It's a 19th-century idea, of course, but now we have 21st-century tools to 
back it up, not to mention a 21st-century identity crisis for marketeers to 
exploit.

The thing is, if you push this reductionist paradigm far enough, then we 
are always on drugs.

In other words, once you start aligning the subcomponents of selfhood with 
different rafts of neurotransmitters, you are already on the way toward 
reconceiving your experience as the product of a tumultuous cocktail of 
chemical triggers. When you hit the treadmill or string a full-spectrum 
light above your desk in order to ward off depression, not to mention pop a 
Prozac, you are in some sense treating your own neural juices as internal 
drugs whose flows you want to regulate.

And this makes perfect sense.

After all, the brain already makes its own equivalents of opium, cocaine 
and psychedelics.

So we're all druggies now. The problem is that we also live at a time when 
the official lies and obfuscations about psychoactives, which are necessary 
to justify the drug war and the multibillion-dollar industries it breeds, 
have the additional effect of eroding the personal responsibility necessary 
to weigh costs and benefits and make choices about how we dose ourselves. 
"Prohibition has broken people's ability to manage their own psychoactive 
use," says Earth. "We've created a culture that can't choose." Instead, we 
are offered a simpleminded and historically insupportable view of "bad" 
psychoactive drugs as malefic invaders whose presence in human brains and 
human societiesis somehow aberrant. At the same time, people are being 
encouraged to take socially approved psychoactives (or, in the case of 
Ritalin, force them on their children). Rather than calling a spade a 
spade, however, the medical-industrial establishment coats these pills in 
"objective" rhetoric that elides the irreducibly subjective dimensions of 
the drug encounter. From industry's perspective, psychoactives are not 
presented as avenues for modifying your own subjectivity, giving you the 
opportunity to explore pleasure or insight or calm, but as technical 
solutions to "syndromes" within the fixed machinery of the bodymind.

The paradox of psychedelics - which is partly a source of their continued 
subversive power, despite the fact that pop culture has already become so 
thoroughly trippy - is that they simultaneously materialize and 
spiritualize the problem of drugs and consciousness.

On the surface level, they seem to support a reductive model, especially 
against traditional religious accounts of subjectivity That is, 
psychedelics seem to prove that some of the most exalted states of the 
human spirit - cosmic communion, profound aesthetic appreciation for 
nature, the integration of self and other, the perception of primary 
pattern, the visionary eruption of archetypal phantasms, the illumination 
of memory - can be triggered with a pill or a plant.

But from the inside, so to speak, these very same states often seem to 
unambiguously support a profoundly spiritual, or at least 
consciousness-centred point of view, over and against a mere biological 
reductionism. In other words, they bring us to the edge of a spiritual 
materialism.

Even if you discount this subjective "evidence" as untrustworthy, the 
profund reflexivity of psychedelic drugs still makes itself known through 
the famed role that "set and setting" play in the phenomenology of the 
trip. Forty years ago, long vefore he went Sci-Fi, Timothy Leary was 
laready talking about the programmability of psychedelic experience, 
arguing that the individual's frame of mind and the surrounding mise en 
scene contribute substantially to the experience - a point that most later 
researchers only further emphasize.

This acknowledgement profoundly changes the model of mind that emerges from 
the drug, becuase the attempt to purely mechanize the molecule - to see it 
as producing a small range of dependable perceptions and behaviours - 
founders on the enormous role that both culture and the psyche play in 
shaping the trip.

The dominant drug paradigm, in the rhetoric of drug warriors and industry 
pushers alike, depends on a very literalist model that ascribes agency to 
the drug itself.

Psychoactive drugs challenge this model, junctioning more like keys that 
open doors that you walk through. "The psychedelic drug doesn't do 
anything," says Shulgin. "The drug allows you to do something." At the same 
time, of course, the drug definitely has its own say in the matter of what 
gets done. But the act of introducing the thing to your synapses, and hence 
your life, is more like initiating a relationship than simply jacking into 
cyberspace through a video-game deck. Many psychnauts naturally think of 
drugs as allies - even approaching traditional organic psychedelics like 
mushrooms and ayahuasca as if they were ensouled by ancient spirits. Many 
of these more explicitly "shamanic" trippers in turn denigrate synthetic, 
lab-produced compounds as soulless industrial chemicals.

But as the weird scientists point out, this is just mainstream literalism 
in reverse.

The point is not the material; it's the dialogic relationship, the loop of 
meaning, that ties together mind adn molecuel. Indeed, much of the appeal 
of novel chemicals is that they deliver one to zones that have yet to be 
mapped by cultural consensus, underground or not. "I start with bottles 
that have no personality at all," says Shulgin. "You make a white crystal 
solid that you don't know and it doesn't know you. And so you begin to meet 
each other." In some sense, this structure of relationship, which is open 
to meaning and communication, applies to all psychoactives, even the most 
mainstream. Like all relaitonships, they can go terrible, terribly wrong; 
like most, they are mixed bags. And yet, to experience yourself as a mind 
arising from a brain means that you are already constantly in relation with 
neurochemistry. And in the years to come, when the expanding range of 
molecular modification may wrap our hands ever tighter around the tiller of 
the self, it might serve us well to keep in touch with the mind that moves 
through realms far outside that anxious simian serotonin buzz we experience 
as ordinary reality.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager