Let's start sort of with a survey. Let me see, I'm going to talk until 1130. So let's start with the survey then and just talk about what the options are.
 And this will be sort of unstructured and conversational with forays into other areas.
 First of all, the striking thing when you want to study psychoactive drugs and plants and their impact on human culture, and that's really what interests me, is how drugs affect culture.
 After I went through Jung and Iliad, my next port of call was McLuhan, and I absorbed very deeply the notion that media structure civilizations in ways that the civilizations are never aware of.
 And Jung, of course, talked about print and manuscript and electronic culture. He did not talk about drugs, but drugs are a form of media because they, information travels through the drug to the mind.
 That's a medium of communication. And various societies wear drugs like clothing with no awareness of their existence at all, somewhat in the way that a fish relates to water.
 So that, for instance, if you're in Dublin, you are swimming in the ambiance of an alcohol culture. You don't have to be drunk to be in Dublin, although it helps.
 The entire society is premised on the possibility, you see. The entire society is premised on the possibility. In India, the entire society is premised on the possibility of hashish intoxication and social mores, building design.
 Everything takes account of this. Cultures don't see this. We do not think of ourselves as a meat, sugar, alcohol culture.
 People do not walk around saying, "Oh, wow, I'm so high on meat, alcohol, and sugar. I can hardly stand it." But they are. And certain consequences flow from that.
 So as I make my way through this survey, you need to bear in mind that a culture takes its tone, its clothing, from the drugs that it admits.
 And you can know a great deal about a culture from the drugs that it excludes, the drugs that it excoriates and fears, because various drugs accentuate and suppress different parts of the psyche.
 So these are statements about anxiety, about various parts of the psyche.
 The striking thing when you set out to do a cultural survey like this is you discover that our culture, the culture of Europe for most of us, some of us are black, some of us are Asian, but largely the roots of American culture lie in Europe.
 This is the most pharmacologically impoverished cultural area on the entire planet. It has the longest history of disconnection from any kind of ecstatic intoxication.
 And the cultural forms of Europe, linear, abstract, narcissistic, and promoting of male dominance, are, to my mind, exactly what you would expect in a culture long deprived of the boundary-dissolving, numinous encounter with the vegetable mind.
 So a lot of the cultural problems we're dealing with are based on the fact that we as Europeans have no place for drugs. We don't really know quite what to do with that.
 As you move south from Europe into the continent of human origins, Africa, you discover that while Africa supports a tropical ecosystem, which, because that means increased speciation of plants, you would think would indicate an increased number of hallucinogens, Africa is surprisingly poor in hallucinogens.
 This is not well understood. As we go through this survey, I will make reference to numerous unsolved mysteries in the field.
 And I always try to do this because I'm hoping that there are graduate students listening who are looking for research topics.
 And there are numerous research areas where important work can be done.
 One of them is this question of the poverty of hallucinogens in Africa. Why? Does it have something to do with the extreme length of time that Africa has been subject to human impact?
 Probably, because Africa is species poor generally for a tropical continent.
 However, in the interest of thoroughness, there is one hallucinogenic drug complex that should be mentioned because it raises issues that are important for the broader context.
 And that is ibogaine or tabernanthaeboga, the so-called Bawiti cults of Zaire and Gabon.
 Now, this is the psychedelic about which we in the West probably know the least. It has spawned no waves of social hysteria.
 It has not been the subject of pogroms or media freakout.
 It's and it's a powerful hallucinogen and it's not only a powerful hallucinogen, but it has a component of sexual excitation, which is ancillary and unusual.
 If you actually have ever looked into the fictive aphrodisiacs, that there are things caused genital chaining and prolonged erection and so forth.
 But a true aphrodisiac, a chemical which would impel you to want to have sex.
 There's nothing quite like that, except this tabernanthaeboga is very interesting.
 We tend to think of an aphrodisiac because we tend to break our heart away from our genitals as a kind of a cold thing, I think.
 But when you talk to these people who are taking ibogaine, they don't talk about aphrodisiac.
 They say this causes open heartedness, one heartedness, they call it. And one heartedness is what they are striving for in the Bawiti cult.
 And they achieve it and they achieve it. And it allows them to resist cultural incursions by Christian missionaries.
 Bawiti is the main cultural force that is holding back conversion to Christianity by these people.
 Fang culture, the people who are using this ibogaine, it's an interesting culture.
 There's a great deal of anxiety in Fang culture about divorce.
 Because in relationships between men and women, divorce is very easily obtained among the Fang.
 But it's always followed by extremely lengthy and protracted negotiations with the family of the divorced partner about return of dowry.
 And a huge amount of neurosis and agony and murder and violence goes on over these dowry return negotiations.
 The ibogaine stands right in the middle of this as a source of one heartedness, making divorce less likely.
 So it's very important as a force for social cohesion.
 And I mention this because when we reach Iowasca, we will see, I mean when we reach South America, we will see Iowasca functioning not as an aphrodisiac or a thing to unify couples,
 but as a kind of telepathic pheromone that unifies whole small tribal groups together into a one hearted, one minded modality.
 And if we get into a discussion of the possible evolutionary impact of hallucinogens,
 we'll see that it always lies in the direction of these collectivized states of mind and dissolution of boundaries between people.
 Other than tabernanthe iboga, Africa's hallucinogens are trivial.
 And I won't mention them in the time we have.
 Cannabis is in Africa as well, but cannabis is worldwide now and probably has been for quite some time.
 Cannabis is a special case chemically and culturally.
 We tend to think of cannabis as a recreational drug, but that's because in the 20th century we always smoke our cannabis.
 In the 18th and 19th century, cannabis was eaten and jellied forms of cannabis that were eaten,
 judging by the pros of people like Theodore Gautier, Baudelaire, Fitzhugh Ludlow, and people like that,
 it was as powerful as LSD without doubt.
 I mean these people were being swept into titanically alien dimensions.
 Well, when we cross from Africa to India, India interestingly, of course, as you all know,
 tremendous depth of at least concern with the spiritual dimension, if not realization of it, that's a tougher call.
 India would be a likely place to look for indigenous hallucinogenic plant cults
 simply because of the spiritual obsession that characterizes Indian thought.
 When we look at the historical foundations of Indian thought, we find that it all rests on a group of texts
 composed between 4,500 and 2,000 years ago called the Vedas.
 And the Vedas are nothing less but the world's longest continuing advertisement for a hallucinogenic plant.
 The problem is we don't know what this plant is.
 This is the mysterious Soma of the Rig Vedas, and Mandala Nine of the Rig Veda is entirely a hymn to Soma.
 Soma held Hinduism of the Vedic phase together.
 Later, it was repressed, and again, graduate students pay attention.
 One of the very interesting problems to be looked at by sociologists, social psychologists, and anthropologists
 is how, if a drug once discovered or a plant once discovered is so wonderful,
 how can these things ever be lost or forgotten?
 And yet, in several instances, we deal with literatures which sing the praises of some plant or drug,
 the identity of which we cannot figure out, or it becomes a big arm-wrestle between various competing schools of scholarship.
 We do not, to this day, know what Soma was.
 Gordon Wasson, who some of you may know as the discoverer, the modern discoverer of the mushroom cults of Mexico,
 founder of the science of ethnomycology, believed to his dying breath that Soma was Amanita muscaria,
 the red-topped, white-speckled Amanita.
 This is a mushroom which has a major role in Tungusic and Arctic shamanism,
 but to say, as Wasson did, that this is the supreme entheogen of all time is not supported by the evidence, I think.
 Wasson's own efforts to become intoxicated on Amanita muscaria were not successful.
 My efforts have not been successful.
 Occasionally you will hear anecdotal evidence.
 Someone will tell a story about eating Amanita muscaria that obviously they had a staggering breakthrough,
 a rupture of plane, as Myrcelia had in his wonderful phrase.
 But it's extremely undependable, and when you look at the botany of Amanita muscaria,
 you discover that its chemical constituency is seasonally variant, genetically variant, geographically variant, and so forth.
 So often, I think, as we gain understanding of a given shamanism,
 we will see that it depended on an extremely deep, local knowledge.
 And if you take what a Yakut shaman says about Amanita muscaria
 and attempt to apply it in the national forests of New Mexico,
 you could end up with a tag on your toe.
 This kind of information doesn't travel well.
 There are old shamans and bold shamans, but there are no old, bold shamans.
 [laughter]
 In looking at the Indian subcontinent for other hallucinogens that may have made a contribution,
 the obvious one, to my mind, is Strepharia cubensis,
 the mushroom which grows in the dung of cows and that the book my brother and I wrote was about.
 Other possibilities, some of you may know that there are a family of the Argyria family of morning glories,
 an Asian family of morning glories distributed from India to Micronesia.
 Thirteen species, all containing psychoactive ergot alkaloids,
 none with a history of human usage.
 Now, this is another area which really fascinates me.
 Why do some plants become discovered by human beings and become the objects of cults which last millennia,
 and others are never discovered at all in societies absolutely obsessed with spiritual advancement?
 This Argyria nervosa is a perfect example because you take the seeds, the seeds are the active part,
 and you don't need much of this thing.
 You need four or five seeds, less than a tablespoon of plant material,
 which I would bet would make it per unit volume probably one of the most powerful hallucinogens in nature.
 And the hallucinations are absolutely stunning, and nobody has ever claimed this.
 It's free for the taking.
 This means you can cut a deal with an ally that doesn't belong to the Hindus, the Mayans, or somebody else.
 It's an unoccupied parking space in hyperspace.
 And it's very interesting.
 The discoveries are continuous.
 Just a year ago, some phytochemists in the Midwest discovered a new plant.
 It's always been there. Nobody's ever taken it very seriously, treated it like a weed.
 Desmanthus ellenoyensis, the Illinois bundle weed.
 This is suggestive that it's called bundle weed because a medicine bundle is of course a shaman's mojo bag.
 So bundle weed, 6% by dry weight, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, the largest concentration of DMT in any plant,
 and unclaimed by native peoples, unknown to the folk medicine of the North American Indians as far as we can tell.
 Well, so this is very interesting.
 Continuing our survey, since we're now somewhere on the Eurasian continent,
 we should mention Papavar-Someneforum, the opium poppy.
 With cannabis, this is probably the oldest human narcotic.
 The Inouen civilization was entirely based on opium, on the use of opium.
 And in fact, when Michael Ventris translated the tablets, the Linear B tablets,
 they got these tallies and they thought at first that the symbol for opium must be the symbol for wheat
 because the tallies were so huge of the stuff being moved and sold.
 And then when they sorted out, they realized, no, for the last thousand years of its existence,
 the Minoan civilization drifted deeper and deeper into an opium narcosis
 that was its way, I think, of anesthetizing the pain of the death of this last outpost of the goddess religion
 because that's what it was. It was a cultural anachronism.
 While Asia Minor had gone over to god-king city-states and bronze-tipped spears,
 the people of Minoan Crete had kept the old, old archaic religion that came out of Africa.
 And then in the last gasp of that Minoan culture, those mysteries were handed on to the mainland of Greece
 and became the mysteries at Eleusis and other cult sites.
 It was said by the contemporary commentators of the Hellenistic world,
 the rites practiced in secret at Eleusis are practiced in public at Knossos.
 And this was the difference, the going underground of the old proto-Minoan mother religion.
 In modern times, we have a horror of opium.
 I mean, people are amazed that I even mention it in the same breath.
 But it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves that this virulently addictive substance, opium,
 was not even noticed to be addictive by anybody until 1627,
 when the English physician John Playfair, for the first time, commented that opium,
 once taken over a long period of time, then there would be a requirement that it be taken throughout life.
 We're right in the middle of a drug war at the moment,
 and it's interesting in that context to notice how the goals of drug wars can change.
 A hundred years ago, the British Navy was involved in what was called the Opium Wars in China.
 Very few people in the modern world have bothered to inform themselves
 to find out that the Opium Wars were about the right of the British government to deal opium.
 The Emperor of China did not want opium dealt in the ports of China,
 and the British government used canon to enforce their desire to sell opium in the ports of China.
 Why were the English trying to sell opium in the ports of China?
 Because the tea trade had collapsed through overproduction,
 and they were stuck with all these tea ships.
 They had created a whole global infrastructure for the sale of tea.
 When the market fell out on tea, they just turned to opium.
 They grew it in Goa, and they sold it in China.
 This was government policy less than 120 years ago.
 (laughs)


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