Mike Jay on Mescaline

use any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So today's guest is a fellow name Mike J. Based in the United Kingdom. I think he may be the most outstanding of all the drug historians living today. And I say that because there's a lot of competition for that title. But Mike has been somebody who's both delved narrowly into specific bits of history as well as written kind of

almost sort of global like histories about drugs. Google Hamm or look him up on Amazon and you'll see his books on drugs include High Society and Emperors of Dreams. But he's also written you a dozen or more other books about madness with all sorts of neat and weird titles. I mean, he's been a historian for decades. He's he's he's written about science and medicine and madness, literature, radical politics, but drugs, psychoactor, drugs have played a really big role

in the stuff that he's been writing. So, Mike, we only just start off by by welcoming you and and thank you so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Oh, great pleasure to be here. I'm talking to Mike here about his latest book, which is Mescalin. It's the history of the drug mescal in. I mean, you've written about the history of drugs going way back. What prompted you

to focus on mescalin as something write about, right? I guess I started writing about the history of drugs at a point when not many people were doing that, and it's become, as you say, a kind of thing that I do um among other things. And the history of drugs is not a lot of what things that we recognize today as psychedelics don't play a huge role in broader histories, largely because a lot of them weren't synthesized

or discovered until then. UM and mescalin seemed to me be a really appealing way of getting at this because unlike L S D, for example, which kind of appeared in a laboratory as we know in the nineties, having had no previous life, mescaline had had many, many different lives before it was the psychedelic, back before the fifties

for decades. That have been why we used in science and in medicine and in psychiatry all the way back to the nineteenth century, and then before that, of course, it a very very long history through the mescaline containing cacti and indigenous history going back thousands of years. So it was a chance to look at something that is kind of a foundational psychedelic and then to see how it played out in different times and places, how it was used before you know, all this kind of very

capacious concept of psychedelic got wrapped around it. And the other thing that was really appealing to me about mescaline was that it's a history that you can kind of divide equally between Western and non Western understandings. It was a chance to tease those two apart and see the roles that mescaline containing plants have played in indigenous cultures, and then kind of in parallel to unfold the story

of the Western discovery of mescaline the chemical compound. I pitched that to my editor and he said, why isn't there a book about mescaline. You know, there's dozens of histories of LSD and m D, m A and stuff, so why isn't there a history of masculine? And I said, oh, man, that would be such a job to pull together because most of the literature is not translated. Huge trunk chunks of it are in French or in German, or in

Spanish or in Polish or Romanian. You know, you'd have to be right across all these different disciplines and the history of science. And he just taking, like good editions do. I was pushy to do something that's more than you wanted to do and sign up for in the first place. So I guess that was the aha moment which I went, Okay,

we need approper history of mascaline. Part of what you do early on in the book is that you take mescaline back to its origins, and that origins doesn't just go back to you know, Native Americans in a Native American church and Peyote in the southwest of the us a hundred years ago or so. It goes back much more, much deeper than that. So why don't you start off, by my test, tell us all bit about that more

ancient history of escaline. Yeah. I think for um, most people who know a bit about psychedelics, the assumption is that this is where the story starts in the nineteen fifties, with all this Huxley and with Mescaline and LSD. That was one of the things that I noticed early on trying to tell the story of mescaline is that is pretty much the end of the story of mescaline. I mean, even when Huxley was writing Doors of Perception, it was

kind of being replaced by LSD and disappearing. So actually, the story, the story of psychedelics, of course goes forward from that moment, but the story of mescaline goes all the way back. You know, it goes back in Western culture, you know, to the nineteenth century, and I think that's a fascinating period that's not really looked at. And then before that we have this long period of indigenous history.

And what really opened that up for me was many years ago, I guess about fifteen years ago, going to Peru, and visiting this ancient temple site called Chavine, which is up in the high Andes, very mysterious site. Not much was known about it until recently, probably kind of a thousand BC. Was one of the first sort of bit of a temple there was built. And it's got a freeze with drawings around it of these figures half human, half animal with kind of fangs and claws, some of

them like they're transforming from humans into animals. And the main one right in the middle is holding this cactus which is very obviously the San Pedro cactus of mescaline containing cactus and in fact still around Chevine there. San Pedro cactus grows everywhere you're up on the high Altiplano there. It's quite wind swept, so lots of people plant hedges of san Pedro around their houses. It's that commonplace. And actually just interrupt you nex thing because that we talked

a bit about this and the Michael Polin episode. But when we think about mescaline, the two principal cactus one is payote um you know, I guess from the similar parts of our northern Mexico in the southwest of the US, and the other one is san Pedro, which grows much more extensively and doesn't quite have the famous ring of peyote, but it's also a major and actually much more abundant source of mescaline in its natural form right, it's enormously abundant.

I remember driving around the Andes and just you know, through those valleys and you're saying, um, mile after mile after mile, there's almost nothing but san pedro cactus. It's not quite as potent, doesn't as a mascaline source as pyote is. Percentages are difficult, but pyotes often about three percent um mascaline and san pedro more like one percent. It's traditionally um brewed up and student re boiled and

reduced and taken as a as a drink. And there is a tradition of its use by Corndero's traditional healers, which evolved on the north coast of Peru and was not really much known about until the seventies when it started to be studied. And now I think san pedro to use it's it's indigenous, it's catch you a name. Wachuma is very very widely used around the world in kind of shamanic neo shamanic healing. Psychedelic contexts m So basically,

I mean one of the encounters writers. You have this use going back thousands of years in parts of South America, and then the Spanish conquistadors and invaders come, and as with coca, there's quite a tangle as I understand, between them and the indigenous users of this. I mean, the main thing, of course, that we get, as you know, looking back into this history is that's the point where

we get written records. So a lot of the Spanish who arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century due to it, and also physicians and Spanish people of learning and military people of different stripes give us little bits of about peyote that give us some sense of how it's used. And they're astonished, obviously to discover this culture, which is in some ways in terms of herbal medicine, it's much

more advanced than Europe. It's got all kinds of valuable medicines in it, but it's also got these mushrooms and these cacti and all sorts of other plants and seeds that produce hallucinations or visionary experiences. And yeah, we start to get get an account of that and what's going on. Of course, it's very heavily inflected through the religious wars and the witch craze which are going on in Europe

at the time. So if people are taking a cactus and getting possessed and going into trances and seeing the future and channeling spirits and not Christian, this is obviously the work of the devil. So from the seventeenth century onwards, the Mexican Inquisition prohibited payote and it became excluded, but nevertheless you can see people carried on using it, and also the Mestizo populations, the generations who emerged after conquest also started started using it for healing and divination and

sorcery and all kinds of other uses. So it became a problem drug, I guess, in the way that we would think of it in the in the modern era, and also at the same time a marker of the difference between indigenous people and civilized Western people. Indigenous people

used payote and civilized Western people didn't. The same way in which the Spanish reacted to this stuff hundreds of years ago really resembles the way the other elements of the Western world, including in the US, respond to this stuff. In the in the late nineteenth and twentieth century when it becomes calm in among you know, for certain different

tribes in the southwest of the US. At one point you say that the Spanish talking back in the fires, the Spanish observed psychedelics through the lens of alcohol, while the Indians treated alcohol like a psychedelic mm hmmm. I think both cultures had very different attitudes to intoxication, and each one imposes, you know, their cultural form of intoxication on this. So the Spanish, i think, looked at indigenous Mexicans on peyote or mushrooms and went, or they're drunk.

This is an intoxication. So they didn't really see the ceremonies in which they were used as sacred or spiritual. They just saw them as kind of drunken orgies. And in the same way, the Indians, when they encountered alcohol, used it in a way that looked to the Spanish as if they were kind of just all congenital alcoholics are unable to refrain from drinking. But they kind of pursued alcohol in the same way that they would pursue

these kind of more intense plant psychedelics. So Spanish habits like, for example, having a little casual drink of alcohol of wine on your own, or you know, something like that. You know, Indians would never have done. But if they had some alcohol and they decided to take it together, everybody would take it together, and everybody would drink at all until it was drunk, and people would have, you know,

the most powerful visionary experience they could have. Yeah, I mean in a way that their distinction between the sort of communal use and experience of mescal land among indigenous folks and on the other hand, are very individualistic use of it among more contemporary Western folks, you know, is a major theme throughout you're writing. Now. Presumably the use of mescaline continues, you know, notwithspanning the Spanish efforts to suppress it in a part of Latin America extending up

through Mexico. But I guess it really enters into the US around the late nineteenth early twentieth century. And I'll have to say there were two figures I did not know about before um who really stand out in this history of a hundred twenty years ago in the US.

One is a white guy named James Mooney, and the other is a Native American, a Comanche leader named I think Quit, And maybe you could just use those two folks to tell us a little of the story about how peyote in the church really get going in the

United States. Yeah, it's fascinating because payote is known back into the tribes back in the sevente century as a medicine, but it doesn't really get used as a sacrament, and the payote religion doesn't really develop until the period of forced captivity after the Indian Wars, when the Indians are confined on reservations. Every tribe has got a different story

of how it starts. But the first thing you hear from white sources is that there's is groups of Indians getting together on reservations at night in the tp so nobody can see what they're doing, and having these private, little ceremonies. And the first white man to attend one of these ceremonies was a fellow you mentioned, James Mooney, who was an ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution who spent that period of his life traveling around Oklahoma and learning

everything he could about the tribes. He learned a lot of their languages, He was fascinated by their traditions which were of course at that point, all disappearing before his eyes, because you know, the Federal Indian Bureau was about, you know, assimilating the tribes into normal American life and breaking these traditions down. So Mooney was really kind of running as fast as he could to catch all these centuries of

tradition before they disappeared. And this is at the moment when the Ghost Dance appears, a new Indian ceremony that it's um prophesied by a prophet who comes up with new dances and new songs and new costumes and begins this movement, this kind of millenarian movement, which is about kind of dancing the white man out of their out of the territory. And this is the late the late

eighteenth century. Basically, Yeah, this is sort of eighteen ninety, and we remember it from the terrible massacre at Wounded Knee that ended it. So James Mooney wrote the Smithsonian Institution's Report on the Ghost Dance that's still one of

the great classics of American anthropology. And the course of this he became kind of a trusted interlocutor and was introduced in Oklahoma by a group of Kiowa people to a Payote ceremony and the wilderness up in the Washington Mountains, which he attended, and after that became kind of a very powerful advocate for Payote because he thought this was really the solution to the problem of preserving indigenous Native American culture and religion, because unlike the Ghost Dance, which

had been, you know, a real confrontation with white society that the Indians were bound to lose, the Payote ceremony was a way of keeping the old medicine alive inside this sort of structure of white supremacy. You know, the people were in the reservations, but when they got together and had their Payote meetings, the spirit of the culture

and the religious tradition could still be kept alive. So Money became passionate about trying to find out where this had come from and how it had developed, and all his leads pointed him back to the Comanche people who were at that time in a reservation in the Washington

Mountains with Kuana Parker as their leader. Kuana had been a rebel one of the last Comanche bands to be brought into forced cap activity, and he became a very powerful leader in this period speaking for his people keeping all their kind of land and property that they've been allocated together and fighting their cultural battles. And he was also a very powerful advocate for payote because he'd seen the ghost dance, I had seen how it was going

to end. He was at a point where he was just starting to get his people living reasonably comfortably and making a bit of money and surviving. So he was also very keen to develop the peyote religion as a way of preserving and sustaining and nurturing Indian culture in this new age they were living in. Mooney eventually went down to the Comanche Reservation and had a Payote meeting with Quana Parker in eighteen ninety three. It's very well documented.

Mooney took photos and after the meeting, Mooney said to Kuana, I would like some payote to back to Washington, d c. To do kind of scientific tests on and so forth. And Kuana sold him a big bill up sack of dried peyote buttons, which Mooney took back to Washington, and they were the peyote buttons that were used by the Federal Department of Agriculture in their first chemical essays that the medical department of the university used them in the

first human trials of psychedelics. They were given to America's leading neurologist to that passed someone to his friend, William James, and he had a terrible time of it. So William James found the drug that took him where he wanted to go. In fact, it turned out to be nitrous oxide, which he writes about in the Varieties of Religious Experience. And you know, so this is really the beginning of

what we now call psychedelic science. And it came out of this transaction in the middle of Oklahoma between the white man who knew most about Indian culture at that point and the Indian who had really of negotiated what what culture best than anyone else. So I think it's a great moment. It's kind of a handover transmission between worlds. It's the point where payote moves from centuries of indigenous

tradition to the gays of Western medicine and science. You know, there were a couple of points you made about this transitory period. One is that peyote in some extent plays

a role. It really among one of the first Pan Indian movements in North America, right, that a lot of it has been much more individual tribes in the past, and where the federal government had played one against the other, and where there has always been a tradition of conflict between any of the both conflict and alliance, but between any of the troops. And here you have a Pan Indian movement. So it's not just one group the Commandes

or others. It's multiple groups. And the second thing that I learned was that actually, when the Native American Church actually gets formalized and created by Kanda and such, it's actually the first time that you see the transition to

the phrase Native American from India. Right. I think you make the point that you know, there have been white Americans who call themselves Native American nineteenth century because they wanted to distinguish themselves from other white immigrants who had arrived the United States at a later point in the late nineteenth century. But the ownership of the term Native American by Indians really happens with the creation of this church, and so that Pan Indian element of it. Just say

a little more about that. Yeah, that was something that had started with the Ghost Dance with all the tribes getting together in this mass act of resistance against white settlement. And it was one of the things that the Ghost Dance collapsed that people like Kwana Parker and James Mooney were very keen to preserve and deepen was his connections between tribes, and that's still very much part of the ethos.

When you have a pyote meeting these days, you should, oh, it's it's good to have a bunch of people from different tribes involved. That's an important part of it. And the concept of Native American this is something that I you know, I'd never read about or seen this before.

It was something that it was actually the president of the Native American Church of Oklahoma, Charlie Haig, who's the Cheyenne, kind of walked me around to the place where the you know, the Native American Church charter was put together and was telling me about the people who were involved, and he said, you know, I think that's the first time that Native American was ever used, and I've never

found any earlier use. And I think it's unlikely that you would because Native Americans didn't become American citizens until five and the church was founded in nineteen eighteen, so at that point, you know, they weren't officially American citizens, and as you said, the idea of a Native American had been appropriated by you know, pretty much the Trumpists of the nineteenth century. So it's very powerful phrase, the Native American Church, and it's making a lot of big claims.

It's also kind of staking a big claim on the future of Native Americans as Americans. And it's also you know, the assumption from a lot of the federal governments, a lot of the missionaries that this this was some kind of drunken Hagen ceremony that was had to be stamped out before the Indians would accept Christianity. What Quanna and James Mooney both said was no, No, it's the other way around this um. This religion is actually an Indian

expression of Christianity. It's not opposing Christianity. It's Christianity with a distinctive Indian form and with its own sacraments. You know,

you to put this into broader context. Was a bit remarkable about all this is that you're seeing the spread and growth and even to some extent legitimation of this Peyote use um and the emergen in the American Church in the context of the progressive era movement in the United States, which is, you know, advancing all of these positive reforms around child labor, working conditions in food, and edicine, all this sort of stuff, but at the same time

as pushing for the prohibition of psychoactive substances. I means the this the progressive woman was pushes for the banning of alcohol in the eighteenth Amendment. It's the progressive movement actually, you know a li'm the banning of opium imports and then the banning of heroin and coca and cocaine. So there's a broad sort of prohibitionist movement directed or virtually all psychoactive substances. And here's peyote and the Native American

use getting caught up in this stuff. But somehow they're able to maneuver and survive through this part of it, I guess must have been the fact that that that you know, you had Kana and Mooney being very clever about presenting this not as a threat or challenge to Christianity, but as somehow advancing the goals of the missionaries and those who hoped for Indians to be better human beings than they imagine they could be. Yeah, that's right. I mean it's a challenge generally for us. Now we think

about the Progressive era. Of course, as you say, it's the era of drug and alcohol prohibition. But I think one of the things, yes, it was the Progressive era was also about uniting progressives and conservatives if you look at things like alcohol prohibition. That was really what made it so powerful, was it. It was a coalition that include you know, doctors and the women's movement and all these traditionally progressive forces alongside you know, the church and

all the the conservative ones. And inasmuch as the Progressive era was about citizen activism and solidarity, of course in the South it encouraged states rights. And it was also the era of Jim Crow and Lynch ngs and so on. So it's got this kind of double side to it. But yeah, I think um Mooney and Quana both independently figured out how to sell payot if you were to a sort of predominantly hostile white culture, and that was to make two claims for it. Firstly, it's a medicine.

This is a very valuable medicine. It's useful for all kinds of things that should really be part of the Western farmer kapea. Western doctors and scientists should be taking a look at this, you know, hitting that message very hard, and at the same time, you know, this is a genuine spiritual experience. It's very valuable for the tribes. The members of the Native American church are often the backbones of their community, and these are the you know, these

are the people holding the society together. And it's interesting to me to see the way they make those claims, because there's a in a way, very much claims that the psychedelic community make today. For psychedelics. You know that it's a very valuable medicine and it produces genuine spiritual experiences. And I think that's that's not necessarily because those are, like, objectively,

the two main properties of psychedelics. I think it's because those are the two sets of values, the two propositions that fall on the most fertile ground when you're trying to sort of present the psychedelic experience to any culture that doesn't understand it. We'll be talking more after we hear in this that I have to say. I mean, you know, my beloved New York Times, if you look

at its sordid history, of covering the drug issue. You know, one of the more infamous headlines was Cocaine crazy negroes, you know, killing people in the South. But another one you pointed out was the headline of there's three peyote used as drug and Indians cult of death above an article arguing that it's worship originated in the Aztec cult

of human sacrifice. So even in twenty three, when you're beginning to have a scientific thing, you still have the quote unquote elite press, you know, doing the worst form of sort of crappy journalism about this stuff. So obviously most Americans are remaining deeply uninformed throughout this time. Yeah,

that's true in you know, progressive opinion as well. You know, there are big kind of spiritual movements of the time, sort of new thought, a lot of people reacting within this progressive era context against mass culture and mass industry and mass consumerism. There's a lot of people seeking out other forms of life and sort of seeking to expand

consciousness in different ways. But even those people, when you look at them, they kind of they're all opposed to alcohol, of course, because they see that as something that's produced by big business. You know, bruins and distillers praying on the vulnerable, advertising their product, addicting people, and kind of that's the way that drugs are seen as well. Drugs are seen in you know, by those progressive figures as something that is kind of deadening and dehumanizing and a

terrible kind of destructive effect on consciousness in modern society. Meanwhile, there's also this fascining story about the head of the Mormon Church, you know, becoming all bit and freily to pay What was there about? I love that. That's fantastic. I mean, here's the here's the grandson of of the founder, Fred Smith. He was and his was a breakaway group, but he was at that point, like a lot of people in the progressive era, saying, um, you know, we

need real ecstatic spiritual experience. That's what's being ground out of people in our kind of the mass culture that we're living in today. And he was obviously in Utah.

The Mormons did a lot of outreach to the Native American tribes, and fred Smith got very interested in their religious practices, and he attended payote meetings and he studied the history of kind of ecstatic spiritual experience, doing a psychology doctorate, and he's reading his William James and he gets very interested all Williams James and stuff about second Wind.

How it turns out that little kinds of ways and all kinds of cultures people can reach what seemed to be the limits of their physical endurance, but then suddenly discover more energy, and there's a whole untapped sources of mental and probably spiritual energy as well, that if we could figure out how to get to, we could be superhuman.

That's what he reads m the Yet his Payote experiences through the idea that if we can stay up all night have this really intense experience altogether, than we push ourselves onto a kind of higher mental plane and we have access to parts of our minds that we normally can't reach. And he wrote quite explicitly, he said, this is what we need. This is what we're not giving

our worshippers. You know, it's all very well to kind of all wandering to church and sing hymns together, but you know, we need to be offering people the possibility of real spiritual transcendence and advocating peyote is the way to go, a proposition that didn't get very far, but he wrote a book about it and a kind of doctor world thesis, and it's fascinating to see the way that uh he sees that something like Mormonism could incorporate

a psychedelic ritually into the center of it. Yeah, and it reminded me so much of this story of Bill w Right, one of the founders of books Anonymous, who I think it was LSD, starts having LSD trips, you know, and and begins to advocate that LSD use could basically help, you know, lead to the kind of spiritual deep insight that's necessary for people to put their alcohol addiction behind them.

I mean, there was a remarkable parallelsm I think, between your story of Frederick Madison Smith and and Buill w But look, let's let's switch over a little bit here, which is that you know, many of our listeners will be familiar with the organization MAPS, you know, founded by Rick Doublin in the eighties in terms of his advocacy around psychedelics research and m D m A. And some will be familiar with the Heft Research Institute, which has

been also around for almost thirty years and probably the leading organization of of researchers and scientists trying to do psychedelics research. But Hefter plays an important role in your story. Yeah, he does. After James Mooney brings the Payote back to Washington and people start taking it and writing up the experiences, often know very beautifully and very wonderful detail, and medical journals.

Of course, chemists get very excited to try and figure out what it is, what's the active ingredient, what's the thing in the payote cactus that is doing this specifically producing the visions, which is a bit that Western scientists get so fascinated by from the very beginning, And it turns out to be a difficult question to answer because Payote contains lots of resins and dozens of different alkaloids.

And there's kind of a race which is won by Arthur Hefter, who's a not very well known chemist in Leipzig, who wins this race by self experiment. He gets his Payote buttons, he extracts some resin, He takes the resin. He doesn't feel anything except but a bit of nausea. Okay, it's not the resin. Then he starts looking through the different alkaloids and then finds the one that produces the visions, which he calls mescaline. Mescal is one of the words,

one of the names for peyote at that point. Yeah, So from that point there is still the cactus, but there is also this alkaline salt that's sort of pure drug, mescaline, which then twenty years later in Vienna is synthesized for the first time in the laboratory, not extracted from the cactus, but synthesized from, you know, some starting from something you get out of eucalyptus oil, you know, through organic chemistry, you get this kind of chemical mescaline sulfate, which is

white crystalline powder. And as soon as you have that much, the next year, um Mark Pharmaceuticals, the German pharmaceutical companies, start making it available as a research chemical, and from that point on you really have two different histories, because Sir, before that, everybody knew that mescaline was this thing that came out of this cactus that had this backstory that's to do with American Indians and so forth. Once it becomes a white powder and a little vile on a shelf,

people forget the backstory. So people forgot that mescaline came from peyote, it became a substance in its own right. Something the same happens with cocaine. In the nineteenth century. The first coca wines and coca products are all branded with pictures of incas and conquistadors and things, reminding us

that this comes from a plant in South America. Once cocaine is isolated, it just becomes like white tablets, and that becomes like what they're called a pure white drug, you know, a product of modern science and changes its identity. And so from that point on, mescaline has its own

distinctive Western identity that separates itself from its indigenous tradition. Well, you know, to jump forward a bit, I mean, there's this point in your story when you get to the week fifties are always sixties, and it's kind of like people had tried mescal in and now they're switching to LSD because they prefer that, or maybe psilocybin or something else.

But the meat of your story, to some extent, is this period really in the first half of the twentieth century when mescaland's it right, there is no LSD and psilocybin has not been um you know, it's sort of extracted and synthesized, you know, from mushrooms and mescalin sort of sort of reigns alone. And there's his vivid history described.

That's part about psychiatry and medicine and part about intellectuals and artists and writers, and so first on that, on that sort of psychiatric side, we know that psychedelics can be risky for some people mental illness. We also know it may be incredibly beneficial with people, you know, having certain types of mentals. Now, when it comes to schizophrenia, there's a special role I think that mescaland plays in

all this. Yeah, that's right, and that's what got it to the point oldest Huxley decided he was interested in in trying it. Through the en twenties and nineteen schies, mescal and it's very, very widely used in psychology, and the thing that people are most interested in studying is hallucinations, as they call them, sort of visual imagery, which is a kind of fascinating subject for psychologists because where do

hallucinations come from? And what do they mean? All these questions, But also they're very hard to study because when people are hallucinating, they're normally either kind of have a high fever or in the middle of a toxic crisis or a psychotic episode. They're normally not very good at telling you what's going on, and normally in a kind of

extremely intense and disturbed state. But what scientists found so fascinating about mescaline once they had it in this pure form is that you could inject someone with it, which is the way they usually went, and then an hour or so later they would suddenly start seeing these visions. You tell them to close their eyes and say, tell me what you're seeing on your eyelids, and people would produce these hours long monologues of these incredible visions that

are having having, you know, very particulately and coherently. So there's a long history of that and of giving mascaline to artists and philosophers and writers to see what they made of the experience. So people like John Paul Sartre and Walter Benjamine get given mescaline. Modernist artists paint on it, and then when you get to the nineteen fifties is where it really finds um it's kind of vital application in psychiatry because that's the decade in which psychiatry starts

getting more biological in its orientation. People discover things like clau promosine, the early antipsychotics, which look as if they can switch off a psychosis. So then you've got these things like mescaline and LSD which are conceived as psychoto mimetics.

The idea is that the effects they're producing a kind of like a model psychosis, a chemical version of psychosis, where you hallucinate and have disjoint in thinking, and time and space gets start getting distorted and all these things that people recognize that symptoms of schizophrenia, which is of course, you know, the great sort of central mental disorder that

everybody is trying to deal with. So you get this idea, well, if we can switch psychosis on w a psychedelic or hallucinogen or a psychoto mimetic as they were called at that time, and you can switch it off with an antipsychotic, then we can play around experimentally. But also that suggests

that schizophrenia might have a chemical cause. So if masculine or l s D produce something like schizophrenia, then maybe there is a chemical in the brain that's something like mesculine or l S D that's producing these um psychosis, and that if you could figure out what that was,

then you could retrofitter chemical cure to it. But in the end there doesn't go very far, right, That's right, there's a great I mean, I think one episode that people people usually remember is ken Kiss signing up as a young man to a psychedelic trial um Palo Alto Veterans Hospital and he's given LSD and mescaline and that's how he gets turned onto them, and then he writes one flu of a Cuckoo's Nest about it. Now. That trial that he was participating in, run by a researcher

called Leo Hollister, was was kind of um. Was was looking at this question of well, are the effects of psychedelics really very like um, you know, the effects of schizophrenia and psychosis. So Hollinger wanted a control trial of healthy individuals to take psychedelics and see what happened to them.

And he went, well this words like this word um hallucination sounds very kind of you know, clinical and precise, and you get it in a lot of doctor's notes, But actually, what are we talking about if you talk about the hallucinations experienced by people having in psychotic episodes. It's often that things kind of taste strange, or they think they're being poisoned, or they hear voices. You know. These are very different from the hallucinations that normal people

have on psychedelics. Yeah, so those two starts to get decoupled. And then around about the same time as well, a lot of people started coming into emergency wards with really kind of having some full blown psychotic episodes and it turned out they've been taking loads of amphetamines and they've carried on taking them, and that was what happened. So

the term amphetamine psychosis was coined. And then people looked at that and went, Okay, well that's working on the dopamine system, So maybe um schizophrenia and the psychotic disorders are dopamine disorders. So at that point the science shifted away from mescaline and LSD and the psychedelics in a different direction. Right, But before this shift, either was enough interesting stuff out there to interest the CIA and its predecessor agency, the o S SC after Strategic Services in

military branches. Of what was their interest in all of this, Well, they pretty much every psychoactive drug they had a crack at looking for truth serums, and they ended up, as we know, sort of mostly with things like sodium pentophile and these kind of narcotic, hypnotic sedative drugs. But on the way, they tried cannabis, they tried LSD, they tried mescaline. So I usually did persist for them for very long until let's see, i A in the nineteen fifties decided

to work with LSD. So he just had this incredible crazy period, completely unsupervised, completely unethical. Were you know, through the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties you had ci A researchers giving LSD usually rather than mescaline, two hundreds and hundreds of people to people in mental hospitals to

convict people without their knowledge. A lot of this, of course, came out in the early nineties seventies, the mk Ultra program was it was called m h. Well there was another thing, too, right, I mean there was I think you said that a lot of us about trying to find a truth serum. Then the other old and I think was about springing it into the air in order

to produce mass anxiety or something like that. I don't think everything ever came of that right now, that's right, or you know, that's sort of the kind of persistent urban legend about how you could put it into the water supply. The idea was that it could be used in military combat in that way that you could disorientate

a civilian population and so on. But yeah, and then there were all kinds of crazy ideas that we could put some LSD in Castro's cigar and kind of you know, right, make him crazy just before he did some big public lecture. There were all kinds of ideas which, as you say, didn't get anywhere. And actually kind of their real life and their real contribution is to fiction. These are all stories that we kind of know from sort of paranoid science fiction spy thrillers, and I think that's where a

lot of them came from in the first place. These CIA agents were great readers of you know, things like the earlier James Bond novels and uh, you know, all the way further the Manchurian Candidate and so on, and I think there's some there's some great interviews with them later where they said, oh, the trouble with the Manchurian candidate was that persuaded everybody. This thing that we've been trying to do for ages have been unable to do,

was possible. There was one interesting line that you head in the book where you said that there was some of the near immergrants would say, is that, you know, with with with alcohol, the hangover comes later, with peyote, the hangover comes first. Yeah, that's right, that's a that's a Native American expression. Uh Mescaline is slightly different chemically from the other psychedelics LSD and psilocybin and d MT.

Trip to means kind of class of chemical that's active at very small doses and heads straight for the brain. Mescaline is a finethylamine. I guess the chemical that it's most closely related to is uh M d M A or two CB. So you have to take a much larger dose and it has a lot more physical effects.

And there's a lot in the Native American church payote ceremony which is about mediating these effects, getting everybody sort of you know, working the physical effects through with the drums and the singing and the kind of whole stages of the of the ceremony and so on. M You also see at one point and it's probably released to the sort of bigger cultural conflict over psycholics in the sixties.

And you're talking about two other quite famous intellectuals in the mid twentieth century, you say, where is Walter Benjamin saw the potential and psychedelics for political resistance in expanded consciousness. Earns Younger saw a weapon of the individual against society.

When he was the fellow coined the phrase psychonaute. I mean, yes, once again, so people sort of using this drug and going in all sorts of different directions, and then many of them getting frustrated and sort of turning away from it. But Alvis Huxley really is kind of the right person, right time, right place. How and why is that? It's partly because he had figured all this stuff out already before he took masculine in this sense, I mean, the

other great origin story of psychedelics is Albert Hoffman's. But if he read Hoffman's notes that he wrote in nine three after his LSD experience, it's kind of a horrible overdose in regards as a terrible, you know, terrible experience. And then gradually you can see as the way he talks about it, it works its way through until by

the nanteen seventiers. You have his famous account of it in LSD My Problem Child, which is all about, you know, the beautiful visuals and the psychedelics and the kaleidoscopes and the whirlpools and the rainbows and so on. It took Hoffman a long time to really get with the psychedelic aspects of LSD UM and I think Huxley actually was

there already. Ten years before he took mescaline. He had written this anthology of the Perennial Philosophy where he gathered together all his favorite sacred and mystical texts from different traditions and said, look, they're all basically talking about the same thing. He'd read his William James of course, and William James had come up with this kind of classification for spiritual experiences, saying they're no ethic, they seem really true,

they seem really undeniable. They just can't you can't prime them. They just come and they just happen. They're not repeatable, you know. So these had a good idea of what the experience was going to be. I think before he took it. I mean, the thing that he's most famous for, you know, the insight in doors of perception that everyone remembers is this idea that the brain is like a

reducing valve. You know, we have all these different experiences and stimuli coming at us all the time, and our brain reduces them down to the little trickle that we can deal with in everyday life and normal reality. And what mescaline does is to take away this reducing valve, and suddenly we get flooded with all the stuff that's

going on there that we normally screen out. So Huxley explains this all to Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who gives him the masculine in his first letter to Osmond, so like way before he's taken it. So I think Huxley had these ideas already worked out, and actually he was a little bit depressed. It was a bit hard to get through to people. People, particularly in the literary world, were kind of jaded and cynical and oh, it's Huxley

and his cranky you know, spiritual theories again. But then suddenly once they were insights from mescaline, which brought with it this idea of kind of cutting edge science, you know, very sort of futuristic, opening up new ideas about the minds. Then a lot of the ideas that Huxley already had were filtered through the mescaline experience, and he really went with it as an identity, having a lot of those early researchers like John pool satro or Walter Benjamin just

took it once. It was an interesting day, They wrote it up and they got on with their lives, you know. So Huxley it became his identity and I think it really turned his late career around and made him into you know, a peculiarly modern sort of profit. And of course that was a contract because when he real breeve New World, you know, there was a prominent drug in their Soma, which was more of the kind of superific.

There was a bad drug. It was the one in which you kept the masses happy at some superficial level, so they didn't challenge the established order. So he obviously got through an evolution in his view of psychoactives phycho active subs. Yeah, I mean Soma is very much the

progressive era review of drugs. You know, it's the drug that's mass produced by you know, forward industries or whatever, and everybody has to take it and it keeps all those difficult individual feelings in place and bonds everybody in a rather kind of you know, bovine way, with the sort of mass consciousness, and keeps society in its place. And I think that was how progressive of that era saw drugs in general. And I think Soma is the

great expression of that. And you know, even like a year or two before he writes Doors of Perception, that's still Hucksley line. You know that transcendence through drugs is a false transcendence and your brains just being chemically manipulated and you might get a brief little illumination, but the

calme down is going to be not worth it. He's like that kind of right up until the moment when he takes mescaline, and then I think he has this thing of huh, well, this isn't drugs, this is something else. You know. There's a little paragraph you have in book which reminded me why Huxley also is that link between on the one hand, the Bill w you know, or Mormon leader Fred Smith insight from the religious side, and

the contemporary researchers. And you write mescaline did not drive Huxley mad, as Osmond had feared, but it triggered the quote unquote truth taking stare. His account has the urgent, supercharged quality of what psychotherapists might describe as a quote unquote spiritual emergency or breakdown breakthrough. It brought a long period of accumulated mental and psychic stress to an explosive moment of truth, from which he emerged with a new

narrative and direction. Yeah, that's right, And I think that's such a that's such a joyous nous and uh Huxley's uh discovery and acceptance of mescaline and uh that deals the perception. I think that's it's kind of wonderful quality. He's this intellectual who has read everything and knows everything and then suddenly light in life. He takes full the milligrams of this powder dissolved in water, and he suddenly

has this breakthrough experience. Yeah. I think at that point in his career there was a lot of accumulated frustration, a lot of ill health. He was, you know, attempting all kinds of remedies for different health problems. His eyesight was getting worse, and it really turned him around. It made him back into a household name in a way that they hadn't been since the twenties, and I think it kind of you know, he just radiates this wonderful

serenity for those last few years of his life. I think his most famous line in the book is when he's looking at his pants and he says, those folds in the trousers, what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity. And the texture of the great flannel, how rich, how deeply mysteriously sumptuous. And I think many of the psychelic no that experience of just focusing on something and seeing the endless number of things you've never seen before. That's right, Yeah,

how though? Did you say it? Actually, he wasn't actually wearing great flannel pants, and his wife persuaded him to change the story. He was just like wearing jeans, and she said, I'll read Rhed read better if you actually substitute flannel pants into this. Yeah, that's that's that's true. Uh, he was, by all accounts wearing jeans. And then when he wrote it and his wife read it, she said, oh, this, I think he ought to dress up for your readers.

And I think that was just right, because if he'd been wearing jeans, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as good. It was because he was this kind of tweety, intellectual British figure that this kind of effusion of joy was so wonderful. H So listen, So now, by the time you get to the sixties, just explain why there's this sort of mass defection from mescal into LSD. A lot of it, I think is about dose. A gram of mescaline is two or three doses. The gram of LSD

is thousands of doses. So you know, even by the time that Huxley was writing Doors of Perception, clinical researchers were switching to LSD partly because it was cheaper, but also because if it was active at such small doses, and it must be hitting some particular trigger or lock and key mechanism in the brain, because the theory of mescaline and cannabis up until that point would been all this kind of floods the brain with sort of weird chemicals.

But LSD obviously wasn't doing that. It was doing something more specific, so I think that made it more appealing. And then by the early nine sixties, when psychedelics were starting to take off in the wider world, mescaline, of course was one of the very first to be closed down.

You know, after sixty three. You know, you could get hold of it if you had the right headed notepaper or a PhD. But even that got tighter as things went along, and then by five when you know, sort of hours Lee and the underground chemists sort of starting to synthesize psychedelics. You know, what are you going to do is at the size and gram of mescaline and give it to two of your friends, or the sizogram of LSD and give it to like everybody in the

Bay area. That's the you know, and that you know, the criminal penalties the same. So LSD entirely took over the illicit market for the sixties drug culture from the very beginning. But mescaline of course had a particular cachet because everybody had read Doors of Perception, and you know, everybody wants wants to try mescaline. It had this sort of magic about it, and some kind of connoisseur chemists would make small bat runs, so it was kind of

always remembered. But I think by the time you got the nineteen seventy probably everybody had heard of it, but very few people have taken it, and the cultural product I think of from that moment is Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where you know, from page one he's taking kind of every drug in the farmer appear and more and then so where do you go, like a third of the way in, you've got a sort of head for some huge, sort of chaotic, apocalyptic

drug experience. And he says, at that point, we cracked out the mescaline. And I think that's because there were not that many people who really knew what it did, but everybody knew what it signified. And after that, I think people remembered it from Fear and Loathing as this kind of it's a sort of no plus ultra. It's it's the most intense psychedelic experience you can imagine. Let's

take a break here and go to an act. You know, there's something almost about mescalin and your story that reminds me of almost like like almost mescalin is almost sort of the forest Gump of psychedelics, right somehow popping up and showing up. I mean, you have this wonderful moment where you you talk about the world at Mescalin plays in one of the great works of Minor American poetry,

which was the poem Howell by Alan Ginsburg. Yeah, that's right. Well, Um Ginsburg and William Burrows were very early adopters of payote and mescaline. They were kind of taking a lot around that Payote, particularly around the time that Ginsburg wrote how And Yeah, that's the story he tells about that, you know, devastating sequence in how We're sort of Molok. You know, this enormous, great kind of sort of beasts that represents some industrial mass society becomes its looming presence.

And there's a point where Ginsberg says he'd taken some payote and was looking out of his window in San Francisco in the fog and sort of big building with all its lights on through the fog, and that's where he got the idea of Molok, this kind of biblical monster that consumes it's young m Now to jump forward, another point you make here is that when you reflect back, you say, the most consequential mescal in trip of the sixties was the one taken in April nineteen sixty by

Alexander Shorgin that rate, Yeah, that's right, Well, that was Alexander Shulgin's first psychedelic experience, and he puts it wonderfully, his sort of his equivalent of Huxley looking at his trousers is saying, um, it was amazing when the mascaline came up, that he suddenly he was at a world that he remembered, but it was the world that he lived in when he was a child five or six years old, when everything was kind of new and fresh

and everything was possible, that it transported him straight back to that childlike moment. You know. William Wordsworth's poetry as another great sort of touchstone for a lot of the early mescaline experiment as I think for the same reason. And then after the trip, Shulgin, who was an organic chemist, became fascinated that there had been so little work around

analogs of mescaline. He started tinkering around and synthesizing versions of it, and of course from those experiments he kind of synthesized M D M A, which was the one that you know, became a breakthrough first and psychotherapy, and then are the street druggers ecstasy, So that whole sort

of second wave of psychedelic culture. I think you know pretty much came out of Shilgun's mescaline trip in that sense, and not just MG, of course, but dozens and dozens of different finel A means and then trip do means different novel psychedelics, I mean notably to CB as well.

I guess, yeah, that's right, yeah, you know, And in a way it made me think, right when we think about the use of M D M A, and we think about it especially in two different types of contexts, right one where or th really three, I mean, one is in the its value in things like couples counseling and psychotherapy and now we're will likely be approved for you know, PTSD, and then we think about your um or maybe that one shifts into the second, which is

the more medical use. But the third has been its use in the rave scene and in people dancing together and enjoying it in that context. And it made me think in a way also, And now this lead to me, Squint, where you talked about the way in which is used communally among your Nativemerican church, among indigenous peoples, but also much more individualistically very early as a group thing among you know, Western world. But that's kind of similarity in

their sort of journeys in a way, or they're different experiences. Yeah, I think that's uh. I think that that's very valid. If you go back to the first Spanish reports of payote in Mexico, they report on it being used in

two different ways. One for kind of healing or divination, which is, you know, effectively a patient and a doctor sitting down in a sort of healing compact in which you know, the payote is sort of the third personality that mediates and you get a kind of conversation between the two people and the cactus from which you know, the solution to the problem, whether it's a sort of medical healing or whether it's divination or sorcery, you know,

emerges from that. And then there's a second use, which you read about in some of the early Jesuit reports where they find particularly up in the north of Mexico where peote comes from whole villages where people take it together, usually around afar, usually at night, usually with that kind of three steps shuffle dance, and people will just keep going on the cactus and on the dancing, and on the alcohol if it's there as well, and get into this kind of group trance group mind for which it's

so wonderfully effective. So I think, yeah, there's two modern uses that you identify. You can follow them all the

way back to the very beginning of the story. In a way, some of them, I think you present as a difference nature of the use of peyote or san pedro between those Native American groups that have been more of the kind of warrior, the hunter, gatherer, the commanches, what have you, as opposed to the other more settled Indians who have been agricultural for hundreds of years, and in part because of their you know, very different cultures, their nature of the use of this it varied substantially.

There's also a big distinction in that sense between the indigenous use of payote in Mexico by tribes like the witch All. There's usually a shaman or someone who's very specialized in mediating these ceremonies, mediating these states and these spaces. It's very different from the use of payote in the Native American Church, which is much more democratic and in a way, I think, perhaps reflecting the white Christian culture in which it evolved, it's more kind of Protestant. Everybody

is their own conscience and their own priest. Everybody is having their own conversation with the payote and the roadman, who is the person who officiates at the ceremony is not a shaman or a priest or anyone with special spiritual power. In fact, they're very very scrupulous about making clear that's not what they are. All the ceremonial instruments get passed around the circle, so everybody gets to share. And that's a i think, a very different type of view.

So it's kind of you know, it's sitting and seeing and praying. It said a way, very very sober as a ceremony. It's not a kind of ecstatic or dionysiac thing in every way. But that also, as you say,

was much more congenial to some tribes than others. The Comanches where it may have started, they were nomadic people, and you know, any warrior pretty much could stand up and say, okay, I want to go down here and do a raid over the border in Mexico here and there, and other people would kind of say, okay, I'm with you and come with him. You get all these impromptu bands for me all the time. So within that context, it was very easy if some people chose to have

the Peyote meetings and other people didn't. That was all pretty pretty loose and pretty simple, whereas with the Pueblo people, you know, he'd been living in much more tightly ordered societies for hundreds of years, where spiritual ceremonies tended to happen in a in a kiva, in a special sacred place, and everybody had their role in the ceremony. Much more

disruptive in that kind of culture. To suddenly introduce the whole new religious movement, Mike, when you were doing this research right about the historical uses of pot and indigenous people's how do you deal with that issue of the sources, especially when they were not There's essentially nothing are almost nothing in the way of indigenous ridden sources about pot. Yeah, that's one of the fascinating things about writing a Western

history and a non Western history in parallel. They're very very different types of history with very different types of sources. So from the very beginning, the Western history is about individual experience. There's an enormously rich history of I took some payote, and I took it at twenty three PM and at nine fifty and I started to notice these violent rings around the you know, it's a story about individ duals and individuals trying to describe this experience in isolation.

And when you turn to indigenous sources, there is really very little like that. You can look out for sort of first person narratives of psychedelic experience from indigenous cultures, and there are really not a lot, And most of them are kind of in conversation with Western anthropologists because I think that's um it's a fundamentally different experience that

produces a very different type of history. It's not so much about the individual experience, it's much more about the It's much more of a communal experience, and it can't

really be lifted out of its culture. So what you're telling in sort of indigenous and non Western histories is much more broadly a story of the people and what's happening to them, you know, And those are wonderful narratives, you know, if you can find your way into them and find enough sources, you know, they're really epic and

really powerful. And you come across it in various sources, sort of which all and Native American Church that there's a bit of a presumption against talking about the actual experience itself. If you say to people, so, what happened when you took the payote and the meeting, what were your experiences? People won't really answer that. And I think that's partly because you're you're not really thinking about your own experience at that point. You're part of something bigger.

And also what you're getting when the payote speaks to you is something that's private. It's something that goes straight to your heart. And there's a lot more Indigenous cultures suspicion about people's motives and why would you share this incredibly private personal experience. Would you be doing it, you know, to boost your status? Would you be doing it to have some kind of influence or control over the person you're telling the story to. You have to come up

the questioning quite a different way. And yeah, there are I'm sure enormous numbers of stories of indigenous people's all up and down the America's and the engagement with masculine containing cacti that we don't know, that we can't get to, but the ones that we can, they end up kind of being a very different type of story from the Western story. And it was fascinating to see the way

that those two kind of sources and historical methods diverged. Well, I think it's also fortunate that you had first James Mooney and then after him the academic Western labar, both deeply committed to trying to present the Indians, the Native Americans use of these things, and they're very different experience to Western audiences, whether in testimony before legislative committees or

in their books and their other writings. And and the fact that there were some who were deeply committed to that probably helped, but not as you and as a historian, but in terms of conveying this alternative perspective, even at the time, definitely. I mean, it's a great tragedy that James Mooney never got to write his Payote book. If we had a big Payote book to sit alongside his

big ghost Dance book, that would be great. But in fact, Western Labarre, as you say, you know, a Yale anthropologist who spent time in Oklahoma in the nineteen thirties wrote a big book called The Peyote Cult, which was kind of effectively in a way, the book that Mooney had never written, and that became a bible for all sorts

of people. It went through edition after edition after addition, and that time, from theties onwards, there were lots of Native American groups who were setting up Native American church branches and chapters around the place for the first time.

And a couple of Native American sources have said to me that a lot of that was in you know, people would pick up the Western Labar's Payote cult as a bible, you know, and it's got the diagrams of how the fire circle is arranged in the different traditions. It's kind of a real how to guide and manual

as well. M M, yeah, I mean. And then of course there's the next step of that where I think you describe with some of our taking along a young researcher named Richard Evan Shalty on one of his first experiences, and he then becomes the famed ethnobodenist at Harvard who mentors a whole new generation of people looking at psychoactive and non psychoactive medicines and plants, et cetera in Latin

American elsewhere. That's right, and that's that is Richard Chilter is his first gig, and he gets interested by reading a book by a German psychologist from the nine twenties, Heinrich Cluver, who did some of that early mescaline research and tried to classify hallucinations in terms of what he called form constants, spirals and lattices and cobwebs, the underlying geometrical forms and what they tell us about the relationship between the eye and the brain and how mescaline might

disrupt that. That was kind of really early classic of

mescaline science cognitive psychology, I guess. And that was the book that Shelter has picked up in Harvard Botanical Library and read and thought, wow, this is fascinating, and then discovered that, yeah, there was this other young researcher, Western Labar, who was going out to Oklahoma and researching Payote, and he went along and they did what they called a joint Harvard Yale expedition, which was kind of the two of them in an old Studa baker bumping up and

down dirt roads on the way out to the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. But I think that Shalter says, well, that was the very first work that he did in this area was fantastic because he he said, Okay, the Payote ceremony is relatively new, and payote is not indigenous to hear, but let's look at all the other plants involved in the ceremony. Let's look at the stage and

the cedar and all the incenses. And he did this beautiful sort of taxonomy of all the different plants that were used in the ceremony, so that you could see that even if the payote was a recent innovation, everything

else was really really deeply embedded in the culture. Yeah, you know, it's funny the way you describe I was some of ours book that, in his making such an effort to depict accurately the perspectives and practices of Native Americans and using peyote, it lands up becoming the sort of guide in reference book for Native Americans themselves and succeeding generations. It reminds me, almost Mike, of what people hear about The Godfather, right, how it's kind of based

up on mafia culture. And then it turns out that the mafia in the nineteen seventies and eighties and nineties, for them, the Godfather becomes their reference point to how to be a mafiosi, you know, So there is this kind of interplay back and forth between the uh, the writer and who portrays it to the broader world and

actually the original people who they wrote about. That's right, yeah, you know, Mike, I'm just thinking that when we think about the sort of you know, the drug war, the modern American drug war, and not just beginning with Nicks in the seventies, but even before that, and you see mescaline getting swept up, you know, getting banned by the Perogrim in the sixties, it becomes you know, subject to you know, the nineteen seventy Controlled Substances Act, I think

it's put in Schedule one. Then goes into the United Nations Convention of seventy one, it gets banned there, but amidst all of the sort of criminalization essentially of the crystal form of Mescaland at the same time, it almost feels like Peyote is sort of carrying the flag as the one semi quasi limited but still legal use of a psychedelic and that even when the threats come down, even when there's movements by the federal government back in the thirties to ban it, you know, the Native American

Church is able to fight that fight back, and then at even at that key moment in the early nineteen nineties when the U. S. Supreme Court and Justice Scalia say no religious exception. The hell were the First Amendment frate and religion here doesn't go that far. You see Congress coming right back, you know, and saying, no, there's gonna be a federally federal protection here for the religious

use of peyote by the Native American church. And so there's something about that fusion of this psychedelic with the sort of Native American use, and that even as Native Americans are being perpetually discriminated again string the second class citizens, being forced into elements of assimilation, what have you, there is that element of difference for this piece of it that enables it to survive and almost carry the torch

until this new renaissance. Yeah, I mean they you know, the persecution of payote was brutal, you know, from the eighties all the way through to the nineteen thirties, and then you had the Indian New Deal and in theory more of an acceptance of the principle of preserving traditional Indigenous culture and worship. But then after that the harassment continued and continued, and as you say, it all went all the way to the Supreme Court in the ninety nineties.

You know, it's been a generational and attritional struggle, and I really understand why for Native Americans it is a little hard to take the fact that we've got this new young generation of white Americans um saying yeah it psychedelics are great, and yeah peyote, and you know, that's I think pretty hard for those, particularly the older generation of people who've lived through that history, to come to

terms with. But I think it is fascinating that at this point mescaline, the crystal, as you say, has pretty much disappeared. You can still get it um, you know, on some chemical websites, but obviously very highly controlled and it's only really used for kind of small amounts of sort of you know, drug testing purposes and so on, as a recreational or non medical or illicit drug. I mean, you could barely find it on the on the dark web.

You kind of can, but it's almost disappeared. And really, you know, the flag as you say, for mescaline, is now being carried by the Catti, and there must be more people around the world taking peyote in San Pedro than ever before that. There are serious conservation issues. Around San Pedro, there is not enough of it. It only grows and it's kind of quite small area of sorry, yes, yes,

around Peyote. It grows a little bit kind of in Texas around Laredo, but there's barely enough if there is enough to supply the Native American Church, let alone all the other people who are suddenly interested in it. So I think what emerges from this is um Actually that San Pedro looks like the future because there are unlimited amounts of it. Unlike Peyote, it grows very very quickly, and you can grow it pretty much anywhere, and lots

of people do. Mescaline is federally prohibited, but you know, growing and trading San Pedro cacti seems to be pretty loosely controlled. I mean, I'm aware of some people being arrested for doing it, but there are also lots of parts of the world where that's not enforced. So curiously, it's the Yeah, it's the San Pedro cactus that has emerged as the foreman, which mescaline looks most likely to survive and be used broadly in the future. That's wonderful way.

So what's the next book about? Well, The next book is kind of a a big survey of the history of drugs. It's working title is Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, So it's kind of the history of addiction and the history of criminalization and drug control. And there was very little about the drug experience and

drug experiments and you know, the user's perspective. So that's the kind of material that I've been gathering over the years, and you end up with this picture where you can see, like, particularly by the end of the nineteenth century, drug experiments in science and medicine are very common and beyond as well.

And this is the period of course, of the birth of psychology and the discovery of the unconscious, and the arrival of modernism, and all these um aspects of modernity are really thoroughly infused with drug experiments and drug experiences. And then in the twentieth century they kind of get written out of our intellectual history because once drugs are problematized,

we kind of forget. This is what I'm really trying to do in this new book is to say that what we have now in the twentieth century, this fascination with drug experiences and sort of expanded altered states of consciousness, which we tend to assume is something that we've just discovered in the West, right, that we have no tradition of.

In fact, there is a long tradition of this in Western culture and Western science, and so that's what I'm really trying to encompass and sort of reclaim and you know, restore that story to where it should be in our intellectual history. Oh, Mike, I can't wait for it, So listen. I mean, I think I'd love this conversation. Let me just tell tad or listeners first. I mean, just take a look at you know, google him, look on Amazon whenever you'll see these amazing sets of book he's He's

written about all sorts of drug and other issues. But beyond that, I haven't really asked this before, but I'm really curious. If you really liked this episode and if you'd like to hear more conversations with historians, just tweet me or send an email to psychoactive at protozoa dot com and let me know, and in which case I will be happy to oblige. So Mike, thanks ever so much, best of luck with this next book, and I look forward to our pass crossing again sometimes. Oh thanks so

much and that's a great pleasure. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You

can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a Brio s f Bianca Grimshaw

and Robert Deep. Next week in advance of the upcoming presidential election in the Philippines to replace President to Turkey. I'll be speaking with Gideon Lasco, a medical anthropologist and what If Philippines leading academic studying the drug war. When I started interviewing the young men, they ended up sharing me their stories about shaboo, about meta feta mean. So I got to know that their their community, I got to know their lives, I got to have out with them.

But when a few years later, the third embarked on this deadly drug war, my thoughts came back to all the young men I met and wondering if they were targeted at all. By by day, and I knew that the people like them were being killed, and I felt that I had a moral responsibility to go back to this topic to be an advocate of drug reform. Subscribe to Psychoactive now see it, don't miss it.