Hallucinations полностью

All of these cravings, high or low, are nicely met by the plant kingdom, which has various psychoactive agents that seem almost tailored to the neurotransmitter systems and receptor sites in our brains. (They are not, of course; they have evolved to deter predators or sometimes to attract other animals to eat a plant’s fruit and disseminate its seeds. Nevertheless, one cannot repress a feeling of wonder that there should be so many plants capable of inducing hallucinations or altered brain states of many kinds.)¹

Richard Evans Schultes, an ethnobotanist, devoted much of his life to the discovery and description of these plants and their uses, and Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD-25 in a Sandoz lab in 1938. Together Schultes and Hofmann described nearly a hundred plants containing psychoactive substances in their Plants of the Gods, and new ones continue to be discovered (to say nothing of new compounds synthesized in the lab).²

Many people experiment with drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, in their teenage or college years. I did not try them myself until I was thirty and a neurology resident. This long virginity was not due to lack of interest.

I had read the great classics — De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradises, among others — at school. I had read about the French novelist Théophile Gautier, who in 1844 paid a visit to the recently founded Club des Hashischins, in a quiet corner of the Île Saint-Louis. Hashish, in the form of a greenish paste, had recently been introduced from Algeria and was all the rage in Paris. At the salon, Gautier consumed a substantial piece of hash (“about as large as a thumb”). At first he felt nothing out of the ordinary, but soon, he wrote, “everything seemed larger, richer, more splendid,” and then more specific changes occurred:

An enigmatic personage suddenly appeared before me … his nose was bent like the beak of a bird, his green eyes, which he wiped frequently with a large handkerchief, were encircled with three brown rings, and caught in the knot of a high white starched collar was a visiting card which read: Daucus-Carota, du Pot d’or.… Little by little the salon was filled with extraordinary figures, such as are found only in the etchings of Callot or the aquatints of Goya; a pêle-mêle of rags and tatters, bestial and human shapes.… Singularly intrigued, I went straightaway to the mirror.… One would have taken me for a Javanese or Hindu idol: my forehead was high, my nose, lengthened into a trunk, curved onto my chest, my ears brushed my shoulders, and to make matters more discomforting still, I was the color of indigo, like Shiva, the blue deity.³

By the 1890s, Westerners were also beginning to sample mescal, or peyote, previously used only as a sacrament in certain Native American traditions.⁴

As a freshman at Oxford, free to roam the shelves and stacks of the Radcliffe Science Library, I read the first published accounts of mescal, including ones by Havelock Ellis and Silas Weir Mitchell. They were primarily medical men, not just literary ones, and this seemed to lend an extra weight and credibility to their descriptions. I was captivated by Weir Mitchell’s dry tone and his nonchalance about taking what was then an unknown drug with unknown effects.

At one point, Mitchell wrote in an 1896 article for the British Medical Journal, he took a fair portion of an extract made from mescal buttons and followed this up with four further doses. Although he noted that his face was flushed, his pupils were dilated, and he had “a tendency to talk, and now and then … misplaced a word,” he nevertheless went out on house calls and saw several patients. Afterward, he sat down quietly in a dark room and closed his eyes, whereupon he experienced “an enchanted two hours,” full of chromatic effects: