26. My colleague Steven Frucht described to me a hallucination experienced by a patient of his, an intellectually intact woman who has been treated with medications for Parkinson’s disease for more than fifteen years. Her hallucinations, however, started only a year ago. She also sees a cat—a grey cat with “beautiful” eyes which wears a serene, “beautiful expression” on its face and seems to be of a most friendly disposition. To her own surprise (for she has never liked cats), she enjoys visits from the grey cat and worries that “something may happen to him.” Though she knows the cat is a hallucination, he seems very real to her: she can hear him coming, feel the warmth of his body, and touch him if she wishes. The first time the cat appeared, wanting to rub against her legs, she said, “Don’t touch me, don’t get too close.” And since then the cat has kept a decorous distance. Occasionally, in the afternoon, the cat is joined by a large black dog. When Dr. Frucht asked her what happens when the cat sees the dog, she replied that the cat “looks away and is peaceful.” She later remarked, “He is fulfilling his purpose in coming to visit me.”
27. Impairment of the sense of smell may appear early in Parkinson’s disease and may perhaps predispose to smell hallucinations as well. But even in the absence of a noticeable impairment of smell, as Landis and Burkhard suggested in a 2008 paper, patients with incipient Parkinson’s disease may have olfactory hallucinations before they develop motor symptoms.
28. Curiously, lower plants—cycads, conifers, ferns, mosses, and seaweeds—lack hallucinogenic substances.
Some nonflowering plants, however, contain stimulants, as the Mormons, among others, discovered. Mormons are forbidden to use tea or coffee. But on their long march along the Mormon Trail to Utah, the pioneers who were to found Salt Lake City, the new Zion, noticed a simple herb by the roadside, an infusion of which (“Mormon tea”) refreshed and stimulated the weary pilgrims. The herb was ephedra, which contains ephedrine, chemically and pharmacologically akin to the amphetamines.
29. Quite by accident, Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic powers of LSD when he synthesized a new batch of the chemical in 1943. He must have
absorbed some through his fingertips, for later that day he began to feel odd and went home, thinking he had a cold. As he lay in bed, he experienced “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic
images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors.” Jay Stevens, in his book
Suspecting that LSD-25 had caused these fireworks, Hofmann decided to test this hypothesis. . . . [A few days later] he dissolved what he thought was a prudently infinitesimal amount of the drug—250 millionths of a gram—in a glass of water and drank it down. [Forty minutes later] he recorded a growing dizziness, some visual disturbance, and a marked desire to laugh. Forty-two words later he stopped writing altogether and asked one of his lab assistants to call a doctor before accompanying him home. Then he climbed onto his bicycle—wartime shortages having made automobiles impractical—and pedaled off into a suddenly anarchic universe.
30. I am quoting from the translation provided by David Ebin in his excellent book
31. Louis Lewin, a German pharmacologist, published the first scientific analysis of the peyote cactus in 1886, and it was named
