A Brief History of Vice

by Robert Evans

In 2012, a study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology finally evaluated the results of six studies, involving more than five hundred subjects, conducted in Norway from 1966 to 1970. The research involved providing therapy for alcoholics via LSD, and suggested that just a single dose of acid could reduce a patient’s alcohol consumption for up to six months. Of folks dosed with LSD, 59 percent reduced their problem drinking. Only 38 percent of the control group did the same.

  Despite those promising results, further research into the effects of LSD on addictive behavior ground to a halt for decades due to its illegality. Recently, it’s begun to pick up steam again. Scientists with the Imperial College London began another study, with just twenty volunteers, in 2015. Scientists in Berlin published research in 2011 suggesting an LSD analog might provide an effective treatment for cluster headaches. A pilot study in Switzerland has shown that LSD can help patients with terminal illness deal with their death anxiety.

  There will always be a place for research chemicals, designer drugs, or whatever else you want to call them on the party scene. And it’s quite possible that government employees with badges and guns will keep busting those parties from here to kingdom come. But thanks to a few brave scientists, we might yet live to see the day when we let these chemicals help us, rather than lock them away from the world. During our interview Dr. Mithoefer read me a quote from Dr. Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in LSD research, that he found particularly relevant to the future medical use of psychedelics:

  It does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.

  And now, after years of prohibition, it seems like psychiatrists might finally be on the cusp of getting their own telescope.

  Slovenia is a small European nation bordered by Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. It was born in 1918, at the end of World War I, and then born again in 1991, when Yugoslavia broke apart. Slovenia numbers a little more than two million people. That’s less than one-fourth of the population of Los Angeles. Slovenia isn’t a major power in world politics. You can drive from one end of the country to the other in an hour or two. But if the rumors are true, it has one thing that no other nation on earth can lay claim to:

  Salamander brandy.

  Purportedly a powerful hallucinogen, salamander brandy is made by drowning poisonous salamanders in brandy. As the luckless amphibians drown, they secrete poison from their skin that mingles with the alcohol in the brandy and grants it a rather lurid psychoactive effect. As the legends go, a salamander brandy trip often includes spontaneous sexual attraction to inanimate objects.

  During my research for this chapter I came across several posts in online communities by adventurous psychonauts looking to find a hookup for this truly bizarre narcotic. What I never found was anyone actually offering to sell salamander brandy. I did find a handful of trip reports and one alleged picture of a bottle, but it doesn’t appear as if the drug has ever been exported outside Slovenia.

  Salamander brandy is believed to be produced primarily in the Slovenian hinterlands, among older farmers and small-scale distillers in the hills around towns like Skofja Loka. Over the last couple of decades, the supposed properties of salamander brandy have grown mythic within the Slovenian drug culture. It’s become the cause for a peculiar sort of patriotic pride ever since a man named Blaz Ogorevc wrote about tripping on it in 1995, for the magazine Mladina.

  Mladina is a publication that trades in both journalism and satire. It published exposés of corruption in Yugoslavia right along with comics meant to translate issues of the day into a language young people gave any fucks about. Blaz Ogorevc, Mladina’s best-known writer, is respected both for his investigative journalism and his doing lots of drugs in the sixties. In other words, the origins of salamander brandy lie in a source both generally trusted and known for fucking around and trying to make people laugh.

  I work for Cracked, a website that targets the same audience as Mladina’s (but in English-speaking countries) and also seeks to attract readers by delivering hard facts and important concepts through the warm, gooey medium of comedy. It’s appropriate, then, that Cracked is the website that brought the news about salamander brandy to the eyes of the wider world when it published the article “6 Animals That Can Get You High” on August 18, 2009.

  Ever since I read that article, I’ve wondered if the myths about salamander brandy might possibly be real, right down to their amphibian-torturing, inanimate-object-humping core. When I started writing this book, I knew I had to use the opportunity to answer this question for myself, once and for all. My research started with one simple question:

  Can drinking dead poisonous animals get you high?

  A Brief History of Drugifying Dead Animals

  We kill a lot of animals today, for every reason from eating steaks to making softer gloves. But if there’s one way you probably won’t see someone in the Western world use a dead animal, it’s to get wicked high. That’s not an ethical issue. If frog blood made a convenient, fun narcotic, there’d be frog farms dotting the Midwest or illegal frog hatcheries hidden in New Mexico’s trailer parks.

  Travel to Saigon, or any part of Vietnam with a sizable tourist population, and you’ll see bottle after bottle of cobra liquor. The bottles often include lizards, insects, frogs, turtles, and whatever other animals happened to be wandering by when the beverage tchotchke was assembled. The sellers hawk them to tourists as potent aphrodisiacs, but unless you’re a necro-herpetophile that’s very much a lie.

  In fact, the bottles sold to tourists are nothing more than dead animals preserved in hard liquor or straight rubbing alcohol. The locals know better than to drink them. But traditional medicine across Southeast Asia, and also in China, has viewed snake wine as a valuable remedy for thousands of years. It’s believed to be an effective salve for ailments as varied as rheumatism, poor circulation, and even cancer.

  I have to think part of the appeal of snake wine is throwing a middle finger to the deadly, deadly snakes themselves. Alcohol breaks down the proteins in snake venom, rendering it harmless, and as a result the most poisonous snakes tend to be popular ingredients. It’s not hard to imagine that the ancient Chinese farmers who started drowning cobras to death in rice wine did it partly out of spite for the animals they’d feared their whole lives.

  Over in Okinawa they make habushu, a type of snake wine produced by drowning a habu. Before you feel too much sympathy for the snakes you should know that habus are the rottenest sons of bitches of the reptile kingdom. In addition to being deadly poisonous, they frequently grow larger than five feet in length and actively hunt human beings (they drop down from the goddamn trees). Habushu purportedly grants the drinker increased energy and a mighty libido, since habu snakes can mate for more than a day without stopping. I’ve been to Okinawa and sampled habushu. It didn’t fill me with energy or a mighty snake-fueled erection. But your results may vary.

  For whatever reason, drowning snakes in booze never caught on in the United States. The only animal-based high you’re likely to hear about people engaging in here is toad licking. And the “licking” part is a major misnomer. No toad known to the annals of science will get you high with a simple lick. But if you manage to track down Bufo alvarius, a.k.a. the Colorado River toad or the Bufo toad, you can milk the poison out of its body, dry it, and then smoke the dried venom for an otherworldly trip.

  Mind you, that entire process is now 100 percent illegal in the US of A, and in most of the rest of the world. Bufo alvarius venom contains a chemical known as 5-MeO-DMT, one of the most potent hallucinogens on earth. If the name DMT sounds familiar, it’s because that same chemical is found in various plants around the world and is frequently mixed with the ayahuasca vine by South and Central American shamans and “shamans” alike.

  That vine contains a monoamine ox
idase inhibitor, or MAOI, which, you’ll remember from our previous chapter, activates DMT orally. If you just take the DMT-containing toad venom straight, say by licking the poor creature, nothing will happen. Nothing hallucinogenic, at least. The other parts of the Bufo toad’s venom are very much active orally, and perfectly capable of hospitalizing or even killing any human dumb enough to eat them.

  Bufo alvarius isn’t the only animal with its own store of DMT, either. Giraffe livers and marrow also contain the drug. In Sudan, the Humr people have figured out how to render these giraffe bits into a powerful hallucinogen known as Umm Nyolokh. This particular preparation of DMT is said to cause vivid hallucinations of giraffes. It sounds like the recipe to a guilt-ridden and deeply unsettling trip. But it also sounds more than a bit like the few trip reports you’ll find of salamander brandy. Here’s Ogorevc’s recollection:

  But damn, a few salamanders walked near by. And they said with their mysterious voices: look, look, who’s there . . .

  Hallucinating an animal that died for the cause of fuckin’ you up makes a certain sort of sense. Drug trips tend to amplify whatever feelings and thoughts are already flying through one’s head. But Ogorevc also described another symptom, wholly unlike anything I’d heard of before:

  And absolutely everything seemed new and strange, and I wished to fuck something, anything. And in this almost full absence from this world . . . I chose the beech tree. Their trunks . . . seemed horribly erotic to me.

  As I mentioned before, salamander brandy’s great claim to psychedelic fame is the tendency to induce spontaneous sexual attraction to inanimate objects. That’s not a characteristic of DMT or any other drug on earth. Alas, modern science has devoted shockingly little effort to discerning just how salamander poison might fuck people up. A psychedelics researcher named Ivan Valencic broke down what little information exists and offered up the chemical samandarin, which occurs naturally in the mucus of the European fire salamander, as a possible culprit.

  Samandarin is absorbed through the skin or a mucous membrane, and it can cause elevated blood pressure and cramps, as well as numbness. The fire salamander is actually the only species with samandarin mucus. Other species of salamander live in Slovenia, too, and it’s not clear exactly what species of the amphibian makes for the most powerful brandy. This means another potential hallucinogenic culprit is the poison enjoyed by every other species of salamander: deadly tetrodotoxin. You might know it as the paralytic agent that makes Japanese puffer fish such a risky lunch. It’s worth noting that local legends of salamander brandy note its ability to “take the legs off” of users.

  Whatever the precise culprit, it is conceivable that salamander brandy has some psychoactive effect. The science doesn’t rule it out . . . but it doesn’t exactly offer full-throated support, either. In the absence of a clear scientific answer, I’m forced to go with the anecdotal evidence of the few narco-anthropologists who’ve gone before me.

  Unraveling the Truth About Salamander Brandy

  Other researchers have attempted to suss out the reality of Blaz Ogorevc’s salamander brandy experience. The first seems to have been Ivan Valencic in 1998. He identified the fire salamander as the key ingredient, and also noted that locals often mixed their drinks with wormwood. (As far as I can tell, he’s the only scholar to suggest this, and he does so without outside evidence.) Ivan claimed that August is the traditional start of the salamander-hunting season, and that salamander brandy brewing is thought to be centuries old.

  This is all exciting stuff, if true. But Ivan’s article seems to rely heavily on his own ethnographic research and experiences in Slovenia. His only source for explicit facts on the brandy is Ogorevc’s article from 1995. Valencic isn’t a chemist or a biologist, but he takes his salamander brandy much more seriously than Ogorevc. According to him, it averages 45 percent alcohol by volume, and five to six 20-centimeter-long salamanders make an imposing 30 liters of brandy.

  Y’know, in case you want to kick off Arbor Day with a mass woodland orgy.

  That all sounds extremely specific, but Ivan seems to have less of a handle on the dosing: he suggests anywhere between 50 milliliters (about one shot glass) and 200 milliliters. It’s terrifying to imagine a drug with that kind of variance in dosage, but it makes sense for a folk drug. There’s probably not a lot of standardization among the sort of people who drown animals to get wasted.

  Ivan also asserts that the brandy is completely clear. That runs counter to the one purported picture of the brew you can actually find on the Internet. Posted by John Morris in 2000, it shows a fire salamander suspended in a light blue bottle of liquor. John was a writer for the Daily Telegraph, and he wrote the column Grail Trail. He traveled to Slovenia and apparently came upon a bottle of brandy himself:

  I had to go through a chain of whispered contacts and endless hours in smoke-filled taverns in Skofja Loka before finding the stuff. It is best enjoyed as a local experience, drunk fresh in the forest where there are plenty of trees to fall in love with. Direct requests for the magic brew will not yield results, but a disapproving local farmer might “happen to find” some of the evil stuff if the price is right.

  Morris gave the price for a bottle at around twenty-five to thirty US dollars, and mentions that autumn—“just before the salamander goes into hibernation”—is the best time to buy a bottle. He also reiterates Ogorevc’s famous claim that the brandy makes users uncontrollably randy:

  The erotic charge of the drink is powerful, but tends to be indiscriminate in its target, so that anything in the natural world can become sexually attractive—trees, plants, animals or even humans.

  That said, Morris gives little that can be called a personal account of the drug’s effects, and he also gives thanks to Ogorevc for help in his article. So we can count Morris’s account as another feather in the cap of hallucinogenic amphibian liquor, but very far from a smoking gun. If this drink’s psychedelic, tree-fucking reputation is all just a practical joke by Blaz Ogorevc, it’s entirely possible Mr. Morris might just be helping him keep it alive.

  I’ve found at least one animal rights website that takes the possibility of salamander brandy seriously. Save the Salamanders includes salamander brandy under its “threats” tab of serious issues facing the salamander species. The site uses a picture from Morris’s article, and contains information it seems to have gathered purely from reading that account and doing no other research.

  Salamanders are also captured and killed for Salamander Brandy, a beverage that actually contains a corpse of a deceased salamander in it. One of the methods in which the drink is cruelly made is to have two live salamanders tossed into a barrel of fermenting fruits and then leaving them for a month’s time. After this point the mixture is then distilled.

  The case against salamander brandy’s existence comes almost entirely from one man: Miha Kozorog, a professor at the University of Ljubljana. He’s authored two papers, one in 2003, published by his school, and one in 2014, published in the book Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. He noted that salamander brandy was quite famous within his local drug culture, and set off into the countryside to try and find some.

  While his findings did suggest that salamander brandy is a real brew with a long and storied tradition in Slovenia, it has no great hallucinogenic reputation. Instead, the name has become a shorthand for the beverage made by disreputable brandy makers trying to stretch their output by adding disreputable ingredients. When he asked local distillers about the brew, they said things like, “We have always been honest brandy makers” and, “Making salamander brandy is a shameful act.”

  Kozorog summarized, “No one mentions salamander brandy in connection to altered states of consciousness, but exclusively in connection to fraudulent brandy making. The term was used when after drinking brandy very negative effects were felt, such as partial paralysis [not a symptom of alcohol use] and sickness.”

 
In other words, there’s a very real possibility that drinking the poisonous mucus of a salamander causes some sort of paralytic effect, which would certainly alter the nature of any bender you got into on the stuff. But Kozorog’s research doesn’t make Ogorevc’s mythically erotic trip seem likely.

  But if Blaz Ogorevc and John Morris are lying, why? The only explanation that occurs to me is one of national pride. Slovenia is a small, oft-overlooked chunk of the European continent. A homegrown hallucinogen of unique effect is a matter of pride in certain circles of society. Kozorog himself observed that the drug is seen as a piece of “national heritage” by some of his peers.

  Salamander brandy was attractive because it was fresh, exotic and “Ours.”

  The matter of salamander brandy’s existence has been seriously questioned, but not quite solved. To do that, I had to travel to Slovenia myself and see if I could bring an end, one way or the other, to this debate . . .

  Tracking Down the Truth About Salamander Brandy

  I traveled to Slovenia in August 2015, starting in the capital city of Ljubljana. I spent several days there, hanging out around the city’s squatter artist enclaves and asking the young, narcotics-inclined folks I met if they’d ever heard of salamander brandy. The answer to that question was always yes, either from reading Blaz Ogorevc’s article or from hearing it discussed by friends at a party. I met only one man who claimed to have tried it: A young stylist at a barbershop who told us that a little bit was passed around at a party he attended once. He claimed it got him high, but he wouldn’t go into more detail.

  He may have been lying. No one else in Ljubljana claimed to have taken salamander brandy themselves; here and there I ran into someone who said a friend had tried it at a party, or been given some by a sketchy uncle. I attempted to track down each of these leads but they came to nothing. After four fruitless days of searching, I decided I’d have to venture deeper into Slovenia if I was going to unravel the mystery of salamander brandy.