Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  As I started to leave the hearing room, I was approached by a tall, well-dressed man with a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard, and an air of total self-confidence.

  "I am Doctor Paul Freye, he said, extending his hand. "And I am the head of the Narcotics Lab here in the Bay Area. I very much appreciated your contributions to today's hearings, and I'm very glad to meet you."

  I said hello and shook his hand. I felt an immediate liking for him. We exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and agreed to meet again in the near future. I had no way of guessing that he would become one of my closest and most valued friends over the years to come, and that we would share many delightful hours in my laboratory, where he would occasionally come on a weekend to "get his hands wet," with the chemical manipulations that continually fascinated him. Paul loved the chemistry of the psychedelics, but was absolutely adamant in his refusal to entertain the idea of altering his own consciousness by nibbling the resulting materials. "Call me chicken," he said once, laughing, "But the very thought of taking one of these drugs makes the hair stand up on my head!" I reassured him that I had no intention of trying to persuade him to take any kind of psychedelic, and that I didn't think of him as chicken at all. We both knew that it was just as well he wasn't tempted to become that kind of explorer, because his position within the establishment would have been severely compromised by any such undertaking.

  But that was the only pleasant note on what was otherwise a very difficult day.

  I avoided the press and television people outside the hearing chambers, but when I got home that evening there were more of them at the entrance to the Farm. I simply drove on by and waited them out, down at a nearby coffee shop.

  The next day, there was a short report on the hearings in the morning paper, with my photograph, and a brief account of the regrets of a drug researcher concerning any of his discoveries which might have become social embarrassments.

  There were very few comments made to me about the hearings or the publicity that resulted, but one of those few was from my long-ago quartetting companion, Andrew. He phoned a few days later to chat, and mentioned that he had for some reason thought of me recently. He had remembered, he said, that I used to play viola in the Club, and wanted me to know that there was a need of another fiddler, and might I be interested in considering re-activating my association with them?

  Here was the innocent side of my conservative friend. He had indeed seen my picture in the paper, but hadn't bothered to read the text (perhaps because members of the Club often appeared in the newspapers for a variety of reasons). With his invitation, and without being in the least aware of it, he had decided for me the above-ground/underground issue. I knew that in the long run, my relationships with people would be more trouble-free and much more valuable, if they could be based on honesty rather than being clouded with deception and manipulation. I wanted, and I needed, an affirmation of my own integrity. I happily rejoined the Owl Club and, to this day, I put on a polite shirt and tie and carry my viola to the City and play in the orchestra every Thursday evening, without fail.

  I should add that I am the only Club member who wears, and always has worn, black sandals instead of shoes, having decided a very long time ago that sandals were infinitely healthier for my feet than the airless, moist environment offered by the kinds of footwear worn by my fellow Owlers. They are used to my sandals, by now, and they are used to me.

  CHAPTER 12. MDMA

  It was in 1967, Y.F.C (Year of the Flower Children), that I attended a conference on Ethnopharmacology that was held in Cole Hall, at the Medical School in San Francisco. The Medical Center was almost exactly in the center of the hippie movement, being only a very few blocks from the FIaight Ashbury. The conference was conceived of by a marvelous curmudgeon and iconoclast named Daniel Efron, with whom I had an especially warm relationship. He balanced two roles with great skill. As the chief honcho of the Pharmacology Section of Psychopharmacology at the National Institute of Mental Health, he was an important voice in the directing of governmental funds to grant-seekers and, because of his influence, he was always being lionized wherever he went. But he was also very much an underminer of sacrosanct ideologies, as illustrated by the organization of this conference on ethnopharmacology. Our friendship was unique in that I had never applied for any government grant, thus had no self-serving reason to befriend him, and he knew it.

  Once I had gone to a pharmacology meeting at Stanford where he was chairing one of the afternoon sessions. I sat in the audience, in the front row, and at one point caught his eye as he scanned faces. After the last talk, I met with him, whisked him away from the professional pharmacologists, and took him off to the Farm, followed by a friend, Saul Snowman, who came in his own car. Dr. Snowman was at that time an assistant professor of pharmacology at a well-known medical school on the East Coast, and this was one of our few meetings in person; most of our communication had been by letter. On the way Danny asked to stop at a store where he might find a box of candy for my wife Helen because he felt he was certainly going to be imposing upon her as a guest.

  At the Farm, we all collapsed into chairs, and everyone seemed suddenly to become human again. Danny announced that, (1) he had always wanted to see my lab, and (2) he used to play the trumpet in high-school in L

  the eastern Europe of his childhood. So we went to the lab where my son Theo had prepared a fire in the fireplace, and Danny had his first view of it. There was a nice, crackling fire. Lichens appeared to be growing on a separatory funnel (they had been glued on years ago) which I had attached to the top of a metal rack; it also bore a funny face drawn in ink by the friend who gave it to me for good luck. The combination of face and greenish-yellow lichens had caused many a stranger to take a sudden surprised step backwards at the sight. Something was stirring and bubbling in a beaker on the bench, there were empty wine jugs on the floor, and innumerable bottles of chemicals on shelves overhead. To complete the picture, there was a beautiful colony of slender-legged, fragile spiders - the kind called Daddy Long Legs - moving ever so gently over the collection of clean round-bottomed flasks. Danny stood at the doorway looking in, cane in his right hand, the left extended, like Balboa viewing the Pacific Ocean.

  "I have -" he said with an accent that defies transcription, "- spent meell-yons of dollars in meell-yons of laboratories, out of which has come notMng, and here is a laboratory in which I have spent nott-vnf, out of which has come everry-tmgV I was flattered.

  When we returned to the house, I unearthed an old trumpet of mine with valves that luckily still worked, and offered Danny a chance to loosen up with Haydn's fourth concerto, my job being the piano reduction and Saul's role being that of attentive audience. Helen looked in now and then to check on our supply of wine and nibble-food. A couple of hours later we were happily exhausted and Saul, bless his heart, drove Danny home.

  With his death, in 1972, Danny's protege. Earl Usdin/ carried forward many of the projects that they had worked on together, and remarkably found yet additional energy to initiate some of his own. He, too, is now part of history. These two close friends contributed in untold ways to the science of psychopharmacology in this country.

  The 1967 conference was entitled, "Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs." This meeting was, to my knowledge, the first time that most of the explorers in the area of psychedelic drugs were assembled in one place. And what a collection of rich interactions came from it!

  Claudio Naranjo, a psychiatrist-anthropologist who had made his way years before through South American jungles to discover the Ayahuasca vine, gave a passionate talk which transmitted the excitement he felt about the jungle images of Ayahuasca-induced intoxication.

  In his experience, and in the experience of his patients, according to Claudio, the taking of plant extracts that contained harmaline invariably brought about visions of jaguars and other fauna and flora associated with the jungle in which the vine grew.

  Also at the meeting was the well-known
and respected botanist, Richard E. Schultes of Harvard, and I had heard from him that he had never experienced these particular types of visual images with Ayahuasca.

  I had the pleasure of introducing them, and mentioned their common interests. Claudio opened the conversation:

  "What do you think of the jaguars?"

  "What jaguars?"

  A small silence.

  "Are you personally familiar with authentic Banisteriopsis caapi?" asked Claudio, his voice slightly strained.

  Richard looked at him closely. "I was the person who assigned it its name."

  Claudio went on. "Have you ever taken the plant decoction itself?"

  "Perhaps fifteen times."

  "And never jaguars?"

  "Sorry, only wiggly lines."

  Claudio turned away. To my knowledge, they have not talked since.

  And there was Chauncey Leake who started things on a loose note, talking of the primitive state of pharmacology at the turn of the century when just about the whole practice of medicine depended on the contents of two barrels in the basement, one labelled "Antiscrof"

  and the other, "Antisyph." The toxicologist and explorer Bo Holmstedt reviewed the history of the discovery of medicines in plants. There was Steven Szara of DMT fame, and Andy Weil, Gordon Wasson, Nathan Kline, Harry Isbell, Danny Freedman, and piles of others who have always been interested in, and have contributed to, this area of pharmacology. Several Russians couldn't make it for political reasons and, interestingly, neither could Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, due to the company policy of Sandoz, by whom he was still employed. A book came out of all this, published by the Government Printing Office, with a gentle disclaimer from the Public Health Service section of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. But very few outside of the group that was in attendance there really cared, and the meeting has now been virtually forgotten.

  I had presented my paper on nutmeg and was wandering around the lobby outside where the real action was taking place, and a friend introduced me to a young professor of chemistry, Noel Chestnut, who expressed a general dissatisfaction with everything he had heard so far, except for one paper on essential oils and their conversion to amphetamine derivatives. He said he would like to meet the author. I said, "I am the author," and thus began a friendship which has lasted to this day.

  Noel saw that the unusual potency of my drug DOM, and its decep-tively simple structure, could be the basis of a hypothesis. If the compound were converted, through some form of metabolic oxidation, to a chemical class called quinones, then a reasonable end-product would be an indole. And one of the principal neurotransmitters in the human, serotonin, is an indole.

  This all just might have value in the area of mental health, which could lead to new grant applications and grant awards, and thence to the funding of graduate students and post-doctorate scholars doing marvelous metabolic studies.

  A young chemist who had graduated from a large university in the Midwest came to San Francisco to take a post-doctoral position with Noel at about this time. His name was Dr. David Ladder, and when we met, flint was struck and fire found. My relationship with David developed into a productive union which still exists today. He is a shy, gentle, brilliant chemist, and we have published countless papers together and will, I hope, continue doing so in the future.

  While Noel was wandering around the world on lecture tours and occasional sabbatical leaves, he appointed me a sort of surrogate "daddy-in-residence," for his graduate students at the University of California in San Francisco. One of these was a dear, dear sprite appropriately named Merrie Kleinman, who told me that she had done an experiment with two very close friends of hers, and that they had used 100 milligrams of N-methylated MDA (MDMA). She shared very little about the experience, but implied that it was quite emotional, and that there had been a basically good reaction from all three of them.

  This was not the first time I had heard mention of MDMA. In fact I had synthesized it back at Dole in 1965 but had never before met someone who had personally tried it. I resynthesized it and found it unlike anything I had taken before. It was not a psychedelic in the visual or interpretive sense, but the lightness and warmth of the psychedelic was present and quite remarkable. I began collecting comments concerning its effects from a number of subjects under a variety of circumstances, and I developed a great respect and admiration for the material.

  I had begun giving a course in forensic toxicology on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It usually gathered between 20 and 30 students, and over half of them managed to stay in there with me to the very end of the course. I doubt that any of them were a great deal wiser in matters of forensic toxicology, but most of them had been exposed to what I considered very useful and important information and had been adequately entertained. One of my more devoted students was a sweet youngster, a guitar player, who had the world's most devastating stutter. Just before most words that starting with a vowel (or, for that matter, with any one of several consonants), he would tie up completely until he either (1) inhaled and exhaled at a measured pace several times, or (2) jerked his head to one side and changed the starting word. His name was Klaus.

  Klaus was intrigued with MDA and, for some reason, with its N-methylated homolog, MDMA.

  He actually arranged to find lab space somewhere in the Life Sciences Building and set up a summer project to work out useful procedures for making MDMA. He was in perennial torment with his speech impediment whenever I happened to see him - which was rarely - and after a while, I lost all contact with him.

  It was some time later, as I was bouncing across campus to a meeting, that I spotted him, and - with only a moment's pause - remembered who he was.

  "How are you?" I asked, awaiting the breathing pattern or the shift of head.

  "In excellent spirits," came the reply, with only a suggestion of a rolled R in the word, "spirits."

  "And your music?" I continued bravely, now doubting that I had identified him correctly.

  "Only once in a while." The 0's in "only" and "once" were each being held just a mite too long, so I was reassured that this was indeed my Klaus.

  "But," he added, without breaking stride, "That methylated MDA allowed me to do new things with myself."

  "What, for example?" I asked.

  ""Well, for one thing, I have some control over my talking for the first time. And I've decided to take up a new career."

  "And that is - ?"

  "Speech therapy."

  I have lost track of Klaus, but I believe that his was one of the earliest clues I had that there was something akin to snake-oil - in the sense of an apparent cure for anything that ails you -

  about this elixir called MDMA.

  Another early trial showed yet a different view of its action.

  A good friend of mine, Charles Miller, had been following my research for many years, and he occasionally asked if I thought it might be useful to him to someday have an experience. I had always put such ideas off to some undefined future time, as I felt uncomfortable with what might come up from his unconscious in any opening experience. Although he was a gentle and giving person, he was strongly opinionated - actually inflexibly opinionated - and a committed alcoholic. And with his daily change of state with alcohol, there was a daily change of personality, revealing towards the end of the evening an outspoken, largely anti-everything person; especially anti-intellectual and anti-homosexual.

  That is a combination that has always been a danger signal to me, and I slowly came to believe that Charlie had in some way come to peace with many of the difficulties that had surely tormented him in his youth. Not necessarily resolved them - but at least gotten them buried deeply and safely into the unconscious. And I was not at all certain that I wished to be the person who provided the instrument to unearth any of it.

  His wife, Janice, had never expressed any interest in such exploration, although she too knew intellectually of my research interests. But it was she
who called me one day asking if she (and her younger son) might use a few hours of my time - to answer a question or two. It was Janice who had the questions; her son was apparently coming along to give her moral support, as he was quite worldly in the drug area. I suggested that afternoon. They accepted. As I have often noted, when the time is right, it becomes unmistakably obvious that it is right.

  Janice, her son, and I, all three of us, took 120 milligrams of MDMA in the early afternoon, and the son went off by himself. At about the half-hour point, the usual "awareness" time, Janice gave no indication of effects, nor were there any changes at the 40 minute nor at the 50

  minute point. A few off-hand comments were offered.

  "My throat is dry."

  "I'll get you a glass of water." Which I did. It did no good.

  "I'm having trouble breathing."

  "So, breathe as best you can." I noticed by the reflection in the window where we were, at the back of the house, that she had no difficulty breathing when I wasn't watching her.

  We walked up the hill, to an area I had leased out to the condominium builders on the neighboring land for the storage of lumber. There were several 'no smoking' signs around as fire warnings.

  "Do you think I smoke too much?"

  "Do you think you smoke too much?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then the answer is: probably not."

  It was now an hour into the experiment, and still no acknowledgment of any activity from the MDMA. Then, came the unexpected question, the "off the wall" question.

  "Is it all right to be alive?"

  "You bet your sweet ass it's all right be be alive! It's a grace to be alive!"

  That was it. She plunged into the MDMA state, and started running down the hill, calling out that it was all right to be alive. All the greens became living greens and all the sticks and stones became vital sticks and stones. I caught up with her and her face was radiant. She told me some of her personal history which she knew well, and which I knew well, but with which she had never come to peace.