Pubdate: Tue, 18 Nov 2003
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
Copyright: 2003 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc
Contact:  http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/340
Author: Faye Flam
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)

ENVISIONING USES FOR HALLUCINOGENS

Long before Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the counterculture generation 
discovered hallucinogenic drugs, the Indians of western Mexico were using 
peyote to commune with their gods.

Anthropologist Peter T. Furst, who spent 30 years among the Huichol people, 
says that Indian shamans have been using hallucinogenic plants as a doorway 
to the divine for thousands of years, likely following a tradition carried 
by their ancestors over the Bering Strait.

And now, some U.S. scientists are exploring how these substances might be 
used by doctors to battle anxiety, mental illness and alcoholism.

"These compounds hold tremendous potential for helping us understand how 
the brain functions, and they have untapped potential for healing," said 
Charles Grob, a psychiatry professor at UCLA Medical School.

Some early studies suggest that LSD can ease the sense of dread that people 
feel when they are dying. "There were some very interesting and promising 
results," said Grob. He recently secured approval from the Food and Drug 
Administration to continue this line of inquiry using the milder drug 
psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms.

"We're really on the threshold of a new era of formal and very tightly 
controlled sanctioned studies with hallucinogens to study their safety and 
efficacy," Grob said.

In Philadelphia, a new show on peyote-inspired Huichol art opened this 
month at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and 
Archaeology. Furst, curator of the exhibition, said these are religious 
images, created with the ritual use of the cactus plant.

"There's a difference in nature between people who use this for religion 
and those who are part of our counterculture," said Furst, 81. A 
German-born Jew, he moved to England and then the United States in the 
1930s. A vaguely European accent gives him a serious, professorial air.

After writing for Stars and Stripes during World War II, Furst worked as a 
journalist for United Press before studying cultural anthropology. He made 
a specialty of studying shamanistic peoples and wrote numerous books, 
including Hallucinogens and Culture.

He maintains that nearly all hunter-gatherer societies practiced 
shamanistic religions, which often used hallucinogens or other 
mind-altering techniques to see gods, the underworld, the meaning of life.

Though he left the Penn museum a few years ago to live in Santa Fe, Furst 
returned this month for the opening of the exhibit, "Mythic Visions," a 
display of a Huichol artform known as yarn painting. In depicting complex 
arrays of dancing deer, snakes and other figures, the artist tries to evoke 
the visions he experiences with peyote.

Small bands of Huichol travel for 300 miles to a desolate spot deep in the 
Chihuahuan desert to hunt for the squat, round peyote cactus. Furst said he 
participated in Huichol peyote hunts and ceremonies and found the plant 
extraordinarily unpalatable.

Furst suggests the Huichol once lived in the peyote-rich region but moved 
to avoid enemies or find more food.

Many other native North Americans used peyote as well as some more potent 
and dangerous drugs. An herb called datura has been used for coming-of-age 
ceremonies, Furst said. Archaeological finds in Texas show remnants of 
peyote that date back around 7,000 years. Even earlier finds show a 
hallucinogenic seed associated with remains of giant mastodons and other 
Pleistocene animals that go back at least 10,000 years.

Furst said he believed it was likely the Huichol and other tribes brought a 
tradition of hallucinogen use from Siberia before they entered the Americas 
more than 15,000 years ago.

Others see evidence for shamanism in early Europe. "Shamanism emerged at 
least 40,000 years ago and is reflected in Paleolithic rock art," said 
Michael Winkelman, an anthropologist from Arizona State University. "Not 
all societies depended on hallucinogenic plants but where they found them, 
people built up institutions around these substances," he said. "They are 
seen as a source of divine inspiration."

When the Spanish invaded Mexico, they labeled peyote the "diabolic root," 
Furst said, and tried to stamp out its use. In the 1960s, peyote achieved a 
cult following. After a long legal battle, Furst said, peyote was legalized 
in 1994 in the United States for members of certain American Indian religions.

Arizona's Winkelman said he believes there is something in human biology 
that makes us want to reach for such altered states. And one infamous 
incident known as the Good Friday Experiment seemed to show you didn't have 
to practice shamanism to have a spiritual experience with hallucinogens.

On Good Friday 1962, some researchers at Harvard gave a small group of 
divinity students either psilocybin or a placebo. Psilocybin, then legal, 
works much like peyote. "Eight of the nine people who got the drug reported 
they had had the most profound spiritual experiences of their lives," 
Winkelman said.

People use the term hallucinogen loosely to apply to many mind-altering 
drugs, but peyote belongs to a small family that share similar modes of 
action on the brain. They include psilocybin, LSD, and morning glory seeds.

The chemical structure of these resembles a critical messenger molecule in 
the brain known as serotonin, said David Nichols, professor of medicinal 
chemistry and pharmacology at Purdue University. When serotonin is created 
in the brain it works by attaching, lock-and-key fashion, to molecules 
called serotonin receptors.

The brain has 14 different types of serotonin receptors, said Nichols, and 
the hallucinogenic substances dock in just one of these, called the 5HT2a 
receptor. "You get the overstimulation of one receptor at the expense of 
the others," he said.

Hallucinogens act on receptors in the frontal cortex, sometimes called the 
executive part of the brain because it's used for higher reasoning, he 
said. They also act on a part of the brain called the thalamus, Nichols 
said, which works to help us distinguish what's novel and important. That 
may explain why people on LSD can become mesmerized by a flower or by their 
own hand.

Studies like the Good Friday Experiment ended after psilocybin and other 
hallucinogens were made illegal in the late 1960s and early '70s, but a 
handful of scientists today are looking at ways these types of drugs might 
help people.

John Halpern, associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard 
University and McLean Hospital, is investigating the possibility that 
peyote prevents alcoholism in American Indians.

In a study he plans to publish within the next several months, he compared 
cognitive and psychological health measures among Indians who were 
alcoholics, those who regularly used peyote, and those who used no drugs or 
alcohol.

Halpern said he can't reveal his results yet, but he will say he sees no 
evidence that peyote damages the brain. "There's no history of it being 
addictive, or trafficked or abused," he said. Peyote can be dangerous if 
people use it to get stoned and then do stupid things, he said, but that's 
not what happens in religious ceremonies

"I've never seen any harm coming from this. In fact it's just the opposite 
- - it really brings families together," he said.

Others, such as David Murray of the Office of National Drug Control Policy 
in Washington, see more serious risk. Working among the Navajo, he said, he 
found long-term peyote use was "counterproductive to education and social 
mobility."

Because the peyote comes from a natural plant, he said, "you're taking in a 
powerful chemical stew," with some toxins in addition to the psychoactive 
ingredient. "It is, without question, a risky undertaking."
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman