Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  My breakthrough came at the Pasteur Institute, where I ran into a post-doc who was a visiting scientist there for a year from the United States; he had, in that time, pretty well unraveled the French academic pecking order. His advice to me was, "Devote a few days to getting introduced to people who might be willing to meet you. Let's start at the lowest possible level, and work our way up." We did just that, and gave it a lot of patience.

  First, I let him introduce me to a number of his peers. He had told me that one of them would try to establish his somewhat more prestigious position in the scientific community by introducing me to one of his peers. My post-doc had advised me: dump everyone else including the presumptuous introducer, and let the somewhat higher level person take you on the rounds of his peers. After a few introductions over a couple of days, the shift upwards will happen all over again. Dump, and follow the new Very Important Person.

  It was a fascinating social structure and it produced, in a couple of weeks, a meeting with a Dr.

  Richard Sett, who had his own laboratory associated with the Sorbonne. He also had some extra space for a visiting nut such as I. He had a marvelous compassion for people who wanted to research new areas. He was at Gif-sur-Yvette, outside of Paris, but still part of the Sorbonne, and I now had my place for the investigation of my obsession, MMDA.

  Almost immediately I made the astounding discovery that myristicinaldehyde was commercially available at a chemical supply house in Paris. I placed an urgent order for 100

  grams and was pleasantly surprised to have it in my hands within the week. But there are unexpected surprises to be found in the French language, as well, which became clear when I discovered that the terms myristicinaldehyde and myristaldehyde are interchangeable in French. I had the latter compound which was totally unrelated to MMDA. I could find no use for it at all.

  So the time I had invested advanced the cause of MMDA not a whit, and I spent the rest of my year in the chemistry of Dr. Sett's favorite project, the organic reactions of elemental cesium.

  And we conducted similarly intensive investigations into the comparative merits of all the local wines and pate's within a twenty-mile radius of Gif-sur-Yvette.

  At the mid-point of our stay, Helen's father died and she returned to the United States. Theo and my father took advantage of my son's still being under 12 and thus able to get half-fare, and off they went, back to the United States the long way - around the world - on another P & 0 Line ship, the Canberra. I was left to have the unparalleled experience of breaking a lease in pidgin French. I escaped intact, returned to the U.S., and to my research position at the Dole Chemical Company.

  I decided to use nutmeg as my raw material, and everything fit together beautifully. I got my myristicin from the natural oil, and its conversion to MMDA was without trauma.

  MMDA was a truly fascinating compound. It did not have the bells and whistles, the drama of mescaline, but was considerably more benign. It was (I thought at the time) my first truly new discovery, and I moved very carefully with it into my small group of colleagues.

  The most moving description of its effects was made by a very close friend of mine, a poet who took approximately 160 milligrams orally, in a group of several friends, and he sent me this report.

  MMDA / Miniature High

  I use the word miniature in the same sense that I would describe a piece by the jazz pianist Bud Powell as a miniature.

  Comparing a Beethoven piano sonata with Autumn in New York as played by Powell would be analogous to comparing mescaline and MMDA. MMDA comes through as a miniature high -

  everything is there but in lesser quantity and duration.

  MMDA stops barely short of the Olympian Universe of time-ceasing and the appearance of organic and inorganic radiances. The immediate part of the high is about two and one half hours in duration. Rather than a cessation of time as there is with mescaline or psilocybin, there is a kind of timelessness during the first malaise-like hour of the high. There is more a feeling of stupefaction than there is with most highs.

  In a car climbing the Berkeley foothills I went into a terrible fear. It only lasted a few minutes -

  but it did not matter in the timelessness how long the panic lasted - it was eternal. I looked out onto the grassy hillside at the dead silver-brown grass. In the expanse of field I could see each separate blade of grass gleaming and the trillions of brown-silver blades blended together into a vast wavering fur. Far below was the panorama of foggy Berkeley and Oakland and the bay. It all began to loom in timelessness and beauty. I thought that I was going to enter the Olympian Universe. I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR THE OLYMPIAN UNIVERSE. I had been expecting something like a marijuana high. I realized that if I entered the Olympian that I

  hadn't yet recovered sufficiently from the last high to hold myself together.

  Heat swelled in my genitals and rose to my stomach. I felt agonizing and perfect fear. I wanted to ask the others to go back so I could take Thorazine. I couldn't talk. The car swerved around a hairpin bend in the road giving me another view of the silver-brown grass-fur and the vast unwanted dearness of the view.

  Suddenly I was fighting with 'Captain Zero' -1 mean the whole disordered and eternity-seeking consciousness that is no longer mammalian in nature but belongs to the order of molecules and inert matter! I decided that all I could do was to go with it - to let Zero take over, but then I was sure that I would not come back. I tried to hold back the high but realized I would do myself damage that way. Then I tried to get on top of the whole high and control it. All in all, I tried perhaps fifteen or twenty unrecallable or almost indescribable means to control or escape the high.

  During this time I believed that I was going to pieces and I would possibly never be with the human-world again. My insides were going wild and my conscious mind seemed to be the only force holding me together. At one point I managed to ask how the dosage had been figured. I was reassured by comparing the dosage to mescaline dosage. For a moment I grasped the fact that I could go through three hours of the fear. Then my insides and mind went wilder. Jesus, I could not enter Olympia again.

  When the car stopped, I was in control and the aroused molecular consciousness had dissipated. The number of exits and ordinary animal powers that I tried had given me control.

  I account the sudden gaining of sureness to experience with hallucinogens. I don't think that any of the methods that I tried worked - but the number of possibilities gave me an assurance that I could control me even in Olympia.

  I told the others what had happened and felt that I could enjoy some of the day, and in a moment I felt the joy of relief. (Interestingly, none of the other participants got to the Olympian Universe during the high. I account the fact that I touched the body of it due to the predisposition deposited in my body chemistry through earlier experiments with peyote and psilocybin.)

  As we walked up the footpath over golden brown dust I saw footprints of birds, tennis shoes, and bare feet. The frightening nature of tracks and artifacts began to overwhelm me. As I walked I tried to insulate myself from the sight. To my right was the dream panorama of hundreds of square miles of enchanted cities and dream-reality of fog pouring upon them from the bay. I was not interested and only cared about keeping myself together and not slipping back to meet Captain Zero.

  The short, eternal, uphill walk exhausted us and we fell on the ground in a tiny stand of trees.

  I still wanted the experience to end and to return to the meanings of daily loves and realities. I had adjusted enough to make it through the high. My companions closed their eyes and began having brain movies. (Earlier my eyes had been forced shut many times by the euphoric hallucination pleasure.) Now I held my eyes open not wanting brain movies or visions. When I closed my eyes experimentally I saw only glorious and pleasing blackness.

  We talked desultorily and dozefully and I realized that I was able to see through the eyes of my companions. They were seeing stark reality exactly as I saw it. I wanted to ta
lk to Terry and find out who he was. I found talking too difficult. My eyes were beginning to close again with exhaustion and pleasure.

  When I lit cigarettes, I could not find my lips well and they were numbed. Matches kept blowing out in a wind that was not strong enough to blow them out. We wobbled as we walked.

  We stayed in a little stand of trees. I sat for a while, then got up and sat in another place.

  Then I got up again & etc.

  Except for visual sensation which was just on the verge of mescaline or psilocybin in vision and clarity, I seemed to be sealed from sensation and living in a kind of hyper-lucidity of sense - a pleasant paradox.

  I lay back and closed my eyes and practiced raising the goddess Kundalini (The Serpent Power) from the base chakra and through my body. I succeeded in raising the power, for the first time, past my shoulders and into my head. I realized, as I did it, that I was not truly raising the Serpent Power but rather cleaning the nerve tubes. However, I achieved grayish-clear affective pictures of the chakra nerve centers. It was a good feeling.

  The crystal clear air gave bright green sharpness to the evergreens. Looking at trees, or leaves of plants, was like a mild mescaline high. Fir trees became living, green, modern sculptures of strange Indian rococo beasts - as if the sculptor Lipschitz worked at their trimming.

  The malaise-like feeling began to end and the dozeful feeling left with it.

  I walked to a redwood copse where other members of the party were sitting. I was struck by the absolute and superb beauty and clarity of the people and the trees and air and the music that played over the portable radio. I felt close to the children and admired their beauty. At this point I realized that I was simply sitting and enjoying a Sunday noon in its full pleasantness. Ordinarily I would have been bored without more to do. The next couple of hours became a pleasant and beautiful picnic. The comedown was abrupt but not unpleasant. I was ready. Time passed with swift rapidity for the rest of the day. Two hour periods would flash by. Late that night I was kept from sleep for half an hour by brain movies - little crocodiles running across dusty roads through spotlights in the darkness, magic evergreen trees fading into and out of reality, and anecdotal sequences of brain visions.

  AN OBSCURE FOOTNOTE

  A week after taking MMDA I woke in the middle of the night and as I awakened I felt that there would be no reality but only nothingness. I was horrified and threw myself bolt upright in bed and opened my eyes instantaneously.

  Shelley says:

  Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call life; though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colors idly spread, - behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

  The awakening I had was definitely a reaction to the MMDA. Yesterday I talked with a man who had taken too much LSD. I tried to avoid speaking on hallucinogens but he was insistent.

  As I described some post-hallucinogen states of extreme anxiety regarding the nature of reality the man began to writhe in his chair, wring his hands, and temporarily lost the ability to speak. I have been in that state. While speaking with Sam he identified it as an anxiety state and pointed out that it is not only related to hallucinogens, but is a not uncommon state for those who have not had drugs.

  Sam accounts the state to an arising of unconscious material to the surface.

  That seems fine and true enough - as good a name for what is happening as any other. What it does not clear up is the intuitions that I have that strengthen and contradict each other. I am aware of two feelings: That the 'material' is of a repressed psychological nature in the Freudian-Reichian sense, and that it is also another order of 'material' confronted. The other order is that of the molecular level of consciousness. I mean a part of ourselves more related to the philosophical consciousness of sea urchins and sponges - who are no more than the tugs of their desires and hungers and the consciousness of their motions and withdrawals - who are an actual conscious part of the physical universe and the actual being of their protoplasm in the 'Surge of Life.' It would be interesting if what we so surely call the 'Unconscious' were in reality two or more vastly divided parts of our being that are commonly inaccessible.

  I am not saying this to strengthen my argument that I confronted the molecular consciousness on MMDA. I was in too much of a fear state to be definite of anything when I think of it now two weeks later.

  But I am intuitively sure that we are meeting two unknown areas - both repressions and a molecular-philosophical-Universe consciousness. I have a strong feeling that the second of these should be left untouched by both psychiatry and happy-day investigations. We mess with some structure that should remain unknown, because it ;'s known by being. Unless the experimenter is aware of the risk and goes slowly in an investigatory manner with caution.

  This report was a treasure to me, in that it gave an articulate and unmistakable "outside"

  verification that MMDA was indeed a psychedelic. It was (at least, for that time) a drug of unprecedented potency, and proved that it was not only mescaline that had psychological complexities. I have personal reports from perhaps another half-dozen subjects who have explored the 160 to 200 milligram range, and the psychiatrist C. Naranjo devotes nearly a fourth of his book, "The Healing Journey," to his clinical experiences with MMDA.

  But the story of MMDA closes on a poignant note of sadness. I had learned that the world-renowned psychopharmacologist, Gordon Alles (the discoverer of the action of amphetamine and of MDA) had been following exactly the same reasoning path as I, and had independently worked up nutmeg and synthesized MMDA. He had actually given it the same initials I had, and had discovered its action in himself. It was with joyful anticipation that we made a date to meet and talk about the many interests I am sure we shared.

  A month before our appointed meeting, I heard of his unexpected and tragic death, apparently of complications of diabetes. As he numbered among his accomplishments not only an enthusiastic interest in self-experimentation, but a broad reputation as an expert on insulin, I speculated (futilely) about what he might have been assaying at the time. I contacted his graduate student but he had no idea, and I fear I shall never know either. Through his widow's private physician, I extended an offer to organize and publish his research notes in a commemorative volume under his own name, but these efforts were rebuffed. I fear that all the ideas and observations he had had are now never to be found. I regard his death as a severe personal loss, although I never met him.

  CHAPTER 7. THE CAPTAIN

  It was the mid-1960's and the time had come to change my employer. I had worked for the Dole Chemical Company for ten years; during that time I had developed a comfortable stride as a chemist, and added a lot of words to my vocabulary in the languages of research and laboratory technique. But it was becoming gradually apparent that both of us - Dole as employer and I as employee - were no longer entirely at peace with our relationship.

  No one could deny that I was extremely productive. A continuous flow of new and potentially patentable compounds were being synthesized and spun into the biological screening processes. These were the intermediates which were the stepping stones to the target materials that I really wanted to make and explore. But the final products themselves, compounds that briefly modified the sensory world of the consumer and perhaps his interpretation of it, were unmarketable. Not that there wasn't a market out there for psychedelic drugs; it was just not the kind of market that could be openly courted by a kosher industrial giant that created and manufactured insecticides for the agricultural world and polymers for the artificial fiber world, as well as herbicides for the military world. This was, after all, the era of our Vietnam adventure, and immense pressures were being brought to bear on big industries everywhere throughout the country, to direct all their energies towards the government's needs. Psychedelic drugs were not exactly what Washington had in mind.

  From my point of view, it wa
s becoming increasingly clear that the corporate attitudes toward my work were shifting from encouragement to tolerance, which would in time -1 suspected -

  become disapproval and eventually, of course, outright prohibition. Since my end products were seen to be of no exploitable value, there had been no restrictions on publication, and I had in fact published, in several first class scientific journals, a goodly number of papers describing the chemistry and the activity in humans of new psychedelic drugs (I still called them psychotomimetic drugs in those days because that was the scientifically accepted euphemism). But the point at which the writing on the wall became obvious was the day I was asked to no longer use Dole's address on my publications. What I held to be exciting and creative was clearly being seen by management as something that would reflect badly on the corporate image.

  So I started putting my home address on scientific publications. And, since this implied that the research was being done at home, it seemed like a great idea to begin setting up a personal laboratory on the Farm, which I had long dreamt of doing. And if I were to actually do the research at home - so went my reasoning -1 would no longer be working for Dole, but for a new employer. Me. That would be quite a move to make. I would retire myself from Dole, which is to say I would be self-employed, which is to say I would become a consultant, which is to say (as I eventually discovered) that I would emerge in a totally new role: unemployed scientist.

  I left Dole at the end of 1966, with all the usual parting rituals observed when a long-time employee retires. There were goodbye lunches with many drinks, there were certificates of acknowledgment with many signatures, and presumably there was the customary changing of all the outside locks.