1
Vegetable to Chemical
She was somewhere around Pang Mapha, thirty-one miles from the Salween River, when the drugs began to take hold. In Spirit Cave in north-western Thailand in about 9000 BC, an early human from what is today Vietnam was chewing on some areca nuts, betel leaf and slaked lime, holding the bitter mix in her cheek and absorbing the stimulating alkaloids through her gums. She later spat out the residue, and that spent wad of vegetable matter was found in the mid-1960s, by American archaeologist Chester F. Gorman on an expedition to the area. It is the world's first known use of psychoactive drugs, discovered fully 11,000 years after the event.1
To reach the fbirst documented psychedelic experience, and indeed the first example of someone sharing written information about drug effects, we must jump forward over seven thousand years. In around 2700 BC, Chinese Emperor Shen-Nung described his experience of taking cannabis: ‘Medical cannabis. Stop eating. Let go. Eat more. You will see white ghosts walking around. And eat long enough, you will know how to talk to the Gods.'2 Emperor Shen-Nung, or ‘Divine Farmer', was a mythical hero in Chinese culture, revered even today by practitioners of traditional medicine. He is the father of Chinese pharmacology and is credited with teaching his subjects how to grow food. His pharmacopeia, quoted above, also mentioned herbal cannabis as a curative, a citation widely accepted by scholars as being the first reference to the plant's medicinal qualities.
The adventurous emperor did not stop at cannabis. Shen-Nung ingested hundreds of other plants to establish their toxicity – or, from another perspective, their powers – and he is said once to have consumed seventy toxins in a single day. But what he did with his mind and his body was of no concern to the authorities. The innate desire of humans to ingest substances that allow us to explore our minds, or experience pleasure, or search for new knowledge and experiences wasn't always controlled by law.
The use of plants and natural materials that affect our consciousness is documented historically in most corners of the globe. Tea, coffee and coca, tobacco and betel, guarana and khat are all natural stimulants that affect the central nervous system, and all have been used for millennia. Dozens of mushroom species, marijuana strains, cacti, seeds and barks, the latex produced by certain flower pods – whether psychedelics or sedatives or deliriants – have been used to induce altered states. From the dawn of human history, plant specialists and medicine women and men with expert knowledge of their effects have been revered figures, especially in pre-industrial societies. Their work crossed the boundaries between the modern disciplines of psychiatry, general practice, religion and magic.
Today the use of substances that change consciousness is proscribed by most nations on the earth, but around five per cent of the planet's inhabitants continue to use drugs that are now deemed illegal. The journey that brought us to this curious point in history is surprisingly short: laws controlling the use of drugs are less than 150 years old. Most recreational drugs at one point had a legitimate purpose. The two most popular at the turn of the century, cocaine and opium, were mainly used as medicines, and the first drug laws were written in order to prevent the dangers of death or addiction arising from their misuse. The number of drugs abused in Europe and the US at the turn of the twentieth century was minimal, and all of those were plant-derived. Psychedelics were, at this time, limited to natural products: marijuana, and psilocybin-containing or ‘magic' mushrooms, and, overseas, mescaline, as found in peyote and other cacti. The latter two drugs were used mainly in religious or ritual contexts in Central and Latin American agrarian societies; they were not often imported or traded, certainly they were not easily available. That reality was reflected in the laws of the era: most early drug legislation was not designed to prevent recreational use, which did not exist in any meaningful or threatening way.
In 1908, Britain passed its first anti-drugs legislation when the Pharmacy Act of 1868 was amended to regulate provision of opium found in medical products, with the aim of preventing poisonings or suicides. Preparations containing opium were henceforth required to be labelled as poisons, although their sale and consumption were not limited. The first American drug law was also opium-related: the government passed a ban on the smoking of opium in 1875, specifically written to target immigrant Chinese citizens in San Francisco and their supposed moral turpitude. The International Opium Convention, the world's first international drug control treaty, was passed in the Hague in 1912.
In 1916 Britain's Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) placed both opium and cocaine under the control of the Home Office. Both drugs were being used as pain relief medicines and anaesthetics during the First World War, and were scheduled in order to protect supplies for the injured and ill. The DORA also aimed to curb the use of cocaine by soldiers in London on leave from war service.3
Britain's Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 went further and limited the production, import, export, possession, sale or distribution of opium, cocaine or morphine to licensed persons. At this point anti-drug laws were easy enough to write and easier yet to enforce. It is a simple matter, legally and chemically speaking, to outlaw a drug contained in a plant, even if such moves are felt by some to be philosophically hard to justify. But this situation was not to last, because drug-making was soon to become inextricably linked with the laboratory.
Opium, magic mushrooms, mescaline-containing cacti, marijuana and, to a lesser degree, cocaine, are all essentially natural drugs. They are extracted or concentrated from plant sources and, with the exception of cocaine, there is no laboratory work involved in their manufacture. The active ingredient of cocaine is extracted from coca leaves, and the extract is concentrated and then combined with an acid that makes the drug rapidly absorbable by the body, but it undergoes no significant molecular change. The other drugs listed above are simply gathered and eaten or smoked. Drugs such as these grow easily only in certain geographical and climatic conditions, and their processing tends to take place in the countries of production.
Synthetic drugs, by contrast, are made in laboratories, and for every one of them it is possible to produce a variation on the parent structure; this makes it difficult to write all-encompassing laws banning them because a slightly new structure is always possible. Organic chemists, who work with carbon-based compounds, can reproduce nearly any natural compound, including any of the active ingredients in those traditional, plant-based drugs.
In the early nineteenth century, scientists did not believe it was possible to synthetically produce certain chemicals derived from living organisms. That was proven to be untrue by German chemist Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 when he produced urea, a constituent of human urine, in the lab. ‘This investigation has yielded an unanticipated result that reaction of cyanic acid with ammonia gives urea, a noteworthy result in as much as it provides an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal, substance from inorganic substances,' he wrote in The Annals of Physics, heralding the birth of organic chemistry.4
All synthetic organic chemical structures are now built in the laboratory in the same way that a builder constructs a house. Basic chemical building blocks – elements – are bonded together in the lab by reacting them with other agents in controlled chemical and physical environments, using heat, acidity and a lack or surfeit of air and water, or any of a hundred other conditions and methods, to produce compounds. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present, pharmaceutical chemists have used the same principles to modify existing drugs and medicines in an attempt to produce variants that are more effective, more potent, or have fewer side effects, and also to produce drugs that are unpatented and therefore possible to commercialize and sell at a profit. Chemist Charles Romley Alder Wright first synthesized diacetylmorphine – known today as diamorphine, or heroin – in 1874 in St Mary's Hospital, London, in a search for a new drug to help wean morphine addicts off the drug. He boiled together a reagent called acetic anhydride with morphine for several hours. This reaction added a new group of chemicals, known as a functional group, to the main morphine skeleton.
There are many functional groups in organic chemistry, and each of them has a different effect on the way the body processes and experiences a drug. In the case of morphine, the addition of two structures made up of two carbons, three hydrogens and an oxygen molecule, known as an acetyl group, made the new drug more fat-soluble, and therefore more of the active ingredient was able to pass through the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier protects the central nervous system from foreign substances that may injure it, and maintains a constant environment for the brain. Large molecules do not pass easily through it, and the entry of highly electrically charged molecules is similarly slowed. Molecules that are not fat-soluble cannot enter the brain at all. Potency is proportional to efficacy and affinity – a measure of how well a drug binds to a given brain receptor, and its ability to effect a response within the brain and body. By adding this functional group, Alder Wright produced a new drug with completely different effects: heroin, which enters the brain more rapidly and which produces a more euphoric effect than its parent molecule, morphine. It is also even more addictive.
Changing the chemical formulae of drugs, even in a seemingly insignificant way, means their effects can be modulated, amplified, extended, decreased or in some way made different, and potency can be increased or decreased by the addition of functional groups. This is a chemical process called ‘ring substitution', since different elements are bonded to the parent drug's chemical rings (see here). These new drugs created using ring substitution are called analogues: they are essentially legal versions of banned drugs, deliberately invented by chemists who add or take away a few molecules from illegal drugs and then commercialize them.
The process of creating or unearthing a legal version of a banned drug started as soon as the first internationally binding drug laws were passed. A little after the ink dried on the International Opium Convention in 1912, dibenzoylmorphine and acetylpropionylmorphine – legal alternatives to newly controlled morphine and heroin – became available; they could be considered the world's first designer drugs, or controlled substance analogues.
Drug use in the pre-psychedelic age in Europe and America remained limited to a subculture made up of junkies and the underclass, bohemians and aristocrats, with minimal penetration into the broader culture. But in the 1940s and 1950s, new hallucinogens emerged, soon followed by new stimulants; both were to have profound effects on popular culture and move drugs into the mainstream. And the involvement of the laboratory in their production made it far more of a challenge to legislate against their use.
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The emergence of psychedelics into western culture was sudden, unexpected and dramatic, and has had long-lasting consequences.
On 16 April 1943, Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann made a curious decision to resynthesize a compound he had made in the Sandoz laboratories in Basel five years earlier. In 1938 the chemist had been producing a series of compounds related to ergot alkaloids, some of which had been successfully used to stem blood loss in mothers giving birth. Ergot is a kind of fungus that can colonize grains such as rye, and its ingestion can lead to convulsions, delirium, madness and gangrene, since it narrows veins and cuts off blood supplies to extremities. In medieval times, attacks of ergotism were seen as divine punishment rather than the simple chemical consequence of eating contaminated bread.
In his work with these alkaloids, Hofmann was attempting to discover a drug known as an analeptic, which would stimulate the respiratory system, and so, as is common in the field, he produced many slightly different variants of the parent drug – in this case, lysergic acid – in a process known as structure-activity-relationship. ‘Thus among other compounds, I synthesized the diethylamide of lysergic acid with the intention of obtaining an analeptic. This compound might have been expected to possess analeptic properties because of its structural relationship with the well-known circulatory stimulant nikethamide,'5 wrote the chemist.
Hofmann's first experience of the drug was not deliberate: he absorbed a microscopic amount accidentally through his fingertips. Feeling unusual, he left the lab and cycled home. The following week he described the experience:
Last Friday, April 16, 1943, I was forced to stop my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and to go home, as I was seized by a peculiar restlessness associated with a sensation of mild dizziness. On arriving home, I lay down and sank into a kind of drunkenness which was not unpleasant and which was characterized by extreme activity of imagination. As I lay in a dazed condition with my eyes closed (I experienced daylight as disagreeably bright) there surged upon me an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscope-like play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about two hours.
Baffled as to how the drug could have entered his body in any dosage adequate to cause such extraordinary sensations, Hofmann repeated the experiment deliberately a few days later and again recorded the experience for others to read:
The notes in my laboratory journal read as follows:
April 19, 1943: Preparation of an 0.5% aqueous solution of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.
4:20 P.M.: 0.5 cc (0.25 mg LSD) ingested orally. The solution is tasteless.
4:50 P.M.: no trace of any effect.
5:00 P.M.: slight dizziness, unrest, difficulty in concentration, visual disturbances, marked desire to laugh …
At this point the laboratory notes are discontinued: The last words were written only with great difficulty. I asked my laboratory assistant to accompany me home as I believed that I should have a repetition of the disturbance of the previous Friday.
With that (rather large) quarter-milligram dose of a tasteless white powder, the psychedelic era began, as did the era of synthetic, man-made and recreational drug-taking that persists to this day. LSD is so potent – active at just a tenth of a milligram – that it enabled drug-taking on a scale never before seen. A single gram could dose 10,000 people. Cultural considerations aside, it was this potency and the subsequent potential for profit that so animated the drug culture that was to follow.
First, though, Hofmann's creation was used by psychiatrists convinced that LSD could unlock the mysteries of human consciousness, and in particular of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia. Indeed, the first descriptor for psychoactive drugs – psychotomimetic – was derived from the belief that the drugs temporarily induced psychosis. Scientists in the UK and US were at that time free to test these powerful new compounds on psychiatric patients as they wished, with no interference from the law, as they were not scheduled or defined as having any legitimate medical use. Dr Ronald Sandison, who died in 2010, was an early pioneer in Britain in the clinical use of LSD. In 1952, after visiting the Sandoz labs in Switzerland and meeting Hofmann, Sandison moved to Powick Hospital in Worcestershire and began radical, government-funded work on the psychiatric efficacy of the substance. There, 683 psychiatric patients were treated with LSD a total of 13,000 times, for which many of them received compensation from the NHS in 2002.
In the US, the army and the CIA experimented with LSD as a truth serum as part of its despicable, decades-long Project MKultra, dosing victims unwittingly in a bid to control their minds in that Cold War era.
At first psychedelic drugs were only available to an elite of scientists, travellers or the fantastically curious. In the middle of the century, bohemians and intellectuals in the West became interested in these consciousness-expanding substances. Initially they sought plant-based psychedelics. Later, they would look to the laboratory.
Beat Generation authors such as William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg freed – or warped – their minds using LSD, and any other chemical they could find, including peyote, mescaline and vines from tropical jungles containing DMT, one of the world's most extraordinary hallucinogens. Burroughs and Ginsberg's The Yage Letters documents Burroughs' quest to consume the mysterious Yage vine, which he has heard can cure heroin addiction, and inspire telepathy (it does neither). Burroughs had read of the brew's power in a paper by Harvard professor Richard Evans Shultes, the father of modern ethnobotany, and essentially had no idea what this drug was, but gamely set off to Latin America to learn more. His odyssey began with a haemorrhoid operation in steamy Panama City in January 1953; he then travelled to a miserable and rainy Bogotá a month later, where he sought out a university professor, Dr Schindler, who was connected with the American agricultural commission. Schindler directed the author to Putumayo, in the south of the country, to seek out a curandero, or shaman. His circuitous route took him to Cali, Armenia, Popayan, then to Pasto on the border of Ecuador to ruminate on leprosy, and to Puerto Limón, near Macoa, where he heard he could meet a brujo, or witch doctor. He jumped in a canoe to Puerto Assis, and a young man stole his underpants in a jungle tryst. Burroughs was then arrested, and sent back to Bogotá as his tourist card was out of date thanks to a typo. Undefeated, he returned to the jungle once more on this epic quest and it was not until 15 April – and after a bout of malaria – that he was able to write to Ginsberg, ‘Back in Bogotá. I have a crate of Yage.'6
(If Burroughs were searching for an excursion into the N,N-dimethyltryptamine space today, for this is the vine's active ingredient, he would need only to google the following phrase: ‘Buy DMT vine' and he would have it a few days later. And in some alternate quantum dimension, if Burroughs were alive in 2013, and feeling cautious for once in his life, he could avoid the attentions of the law by simply searching for powerful and legal DMT analogues available, legally, online in the USA. He could send an electronic payment, and have the drug posted to him the next day. And if he had wanted to fulfil his evident lifelong death wish, he could, until January 2011, have ordered an even more powerful chemical in the same family, 5-MeO-DMT, at that point legal in the US, smoked a few milligrams from a glass pipe, and experienced the closest state to death and a consciousness of the void available without his heart actually beating its last.)
The year 1955 marked another watershed in psychedelic history. On 23 June, in a small adobe hut in Oaxaca, Mexico, American investment banker R. Gordon Wasson of J.P. Morgan was handed a dozen mushrooms by curandera – or female shaman – Eva Mendez. He ate them. Unknown to the banker, Mendez had given him psilocybin, a chemical named O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine or more snappily, 4-PO-DMT. Psilocybin, a naturally occurring substance, is found in hundreds of mushroom species at many latitudes on the planet. The backbone substance, tryptamine, is one of the two main chemical classes of drugs that can cause psychedelic or visionary experiences in humans. Skilled chemists can produce thousands of variations on the tryptamine form.
The effect of drugs related to tryptamine tends to resemble the magic mushroom experience – though this is to paint it with enormously broad and clumsy brushstrokes. Typical effects are open and closed-eye hallucinations with geometric patterns and visions, amusement, bewilderment, auditory distortion and, for an unfortunate few, thought-looping existential crises or blind panic. In an article in the 13 May 1957 edition of Life magazine, Wasson said his mushroom expedition was the culmination of a lifelong quest to understand the links between mythology and toadstools. Whatever his intentions, and whatever the root cause of his motivation (conspiracies abound) he did a fine job of persuading millions of people after him to indulge in a natural psychedelic experience. He wrote:
We were never more wide awake, and the visions came whether our eyes were opened or closed. They emerged from the center of the field of vision, opening up as they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that our will chose. They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens – resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones.
Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.7
The psychedelic experience differs markedly to most previous drug states available to westerners up until that time. Opiates and cocaine sedate or cause euphoria and a sense of increased energy and confidence, but true psychedelics cause a simultaneous ontological explosion and implosion. They have an effect upon the mind that cannot be simply expressed, and which, indeed, can only be truly understood if experienced. And taking psychedelics seems to spur people on to describe, document, discuss and communicate their experiences, generally because they are so baffling and novel. The drugs are not addictive, metabolically, but their effects are so profound that many users return for more.
Wasson was so dumbfounded that he went back to repeat the experience just three days later:
I repeated the same experience in the same room with the same curanderas, instead of mountains I saw river estuaries, pellucid water flowing through an endless expanse of reeds down to a measureless sea, all by the pastel light of a horizontal sun. This time a human figure appeared, a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic, beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored garments. It seemed as though I was viewing a world of which I was not a part and with which I could not hope to establish contact. There I was, poised in space, a disembodied eye, invisible, incorporeal, seeing but not seen.
Many intellectuals, chemists and other inquisitive people were fascinated by the psychedelic drug mescaline in the 1950s. The active chemical was first isolated from the peyote cactus by Arthur Heffter, a German pharmacologist, in 1897. Ernst Spath, an Austrian chemist, synthesized the drug in the lab in 1919. Mescaline, or 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine, is the drug that startled author Aldous Huxley into writing The Doors of Perception, the 1954 psychedelic classic. Its chemical backbone is phenethylamine, the other category of drug that prompts hallucinations and mystical experiences in humans. Phenethylamine is as malleable in the hands of a skilled chemist as the tryptamine skeleton, and can be manipulated in similar countless ways to produce hallucinogenic stimulant drugs.
Mescaline, which has long been used by indigenous peoples for religious and divinatory purposes, exists naturally in hundreds of cacti species all over the Americas, with a few examples found in the Caribbean. The presence of the extra chemicals on the phenethylamine skeleton changes its subjective effects, and makes humans who take it hallucinate and experience extraordinary and unusual effects, such as a sense of wonder at the natural world, or indeed almost anything, much laughter and intimacy with friends, along with a feeling of peace and, often, profound reflection in the final stages of the drug.
Lawmakers worldwide have forbidden most humans from experiencing its effects, although it has been used for millennia, and its effects have been studied over long periods in traditional user groups and found to be largely harmless, even beneficial.
One of the first and most diverting documentations of the use of mescaline in its natural form was actually made in 1898, in The Contemporary Review, one of the oldest English publications in the world, founded in 1866. Havelock Ellis was a British physician and social reformer who became renowned for his a radically objective scientific approach to the study of sexuality. He wrote the first medical textbook on homosexuality, and though some of his stances are anachronistic and even objectionable today – he details man-boy relationships impassively, and was later a eugenicist – his writings contained an unflinching look at hidden aspects of modern life as it accelerated into the Victorian age. He moved in circles that later formed the Fabian Society, Britain's oldest political think-tank.
His 1898 essay for the Contemporary Review, ‘Mescal, a New Artificial Paradise',8 brought some of that modern and open-minded attitude to the world of psychoactive drugs. The first of his writings on mescaline, it is an evocative description of the experience and predates Aldous Huxley's musings on the matter by almost half a century. Ellis used his own body as the laboratory of discovery, and his work was neither illegal nor hidden. On Good Friday the previous year, at around 2.30 p.m., Ellis had brewed up some peyote buttons in his rooms in the Temple, London, and swallowed the bitter tisane. Soon afterwards, he started hallucinating.
He described how he was gently assailed by benign, bejewelled visions. Unfamiliar and intricate flower petals and gauzy butterfly wings wreathed his mind, folding and morphing before his eyes, and behind his eyes, for it mattered not whether they were opened or closed, he said. Every colour of the spectrum was present, a vast profusion, and he delighted in this glorious aesthetic overdose as his visions transformed once more into porcelain and lace, lattice-style mouchrabieh woodcarvings of Cairo, towering Maori-style archetypes of architecture.
As time passed and the drug's effects diminished, he found sleep elusive and became fixated on his own legs and the shadows on the ceiling. Thirteen hours later, he closed his notebook after documenting the whole day's events. He soon introduced friends to the experience, who reported extraordinary visions and ‘a very marked sense of well-being'.
Almost sixty years later, at noon on Friday, 2 December 1955, a distinguished member of the British establishment had a similar experience. A well-dressed pair of men, with cut-glass accents so refined they could contain a small measure of sherry, sat in an austere, post-war British front room. For one of the men, that would remain the case. The other man was about to witness an exquisite aesthetic transformation and a baffling temporal shift that would change his worldview for many decades to come. Between them sat a microphone, and a TV crew for BBC1's Panorama documentary series filming the event. It marks the emergence of psychedelic drugs from the laboratory and the clinic into mainstream culture.
Liberal (at the time; he had previously been Labour) MP Christopher Mayhew steepled his fingers nervously and leant back with an awful, uneasy élan as the BBC's cameras rolled. He was preparing to be administered a strong, 400 mg oral dose of pure mescaline hydrochloride. The clock swung to midday. ‘I'm feeling perfectly fit at the moment and as sane as I ever am. And I'll take the drug now,' said Mayhew in his stiff starched collars and brilliantine. An hour later, the molecule had entered the MP's brain, and his curtains, previously a mundane blue, now seemed to be a florid, splendid mass of writhing colour. He was most pleased by their appearance. His face, before a tense knot of feigned confidence, was now lit up with a beaming grin he couldn't quite control. The friend who had given him the drug, the fabulously named Humphrey Fortescue Osmond, was a progressive psychiatrist who claimed his place in drug history by inventing the word ‘psychedelic', meaning ‘mind manifesting', in correspondence with fellow mescaline fan and author Aldous Huxley. Today, Osmond would be classed as a drug dealer, though he was serving up highs that were, at that time, legal.
They weren't even considered highs, but rather medicines; Osmond successfully treated many alcoholics with LSD in the 1950s until the drug was banned. Mayhew couldn't have been in safer hands, even if Osmond did proceed to oversee a bizarre interview in which the MP, once the drug took hold, became convinced he was travelling through time. ‘Now, I'm off again, Humphrey,' he said. ‘In my period of time. I'm off again for long periods, but you won't notice that I've gone away for…'
Osmond often asked Mayhew to repeat, much as one might ask a maniac the name of the president or the current prime minister to measure their level of derangement, the mystifying phrase ‘To be prosperous, a nation requires a safe and secure supply of wood'. The MP didn't manage it very often, and, as time went on (and on, and on) Mayhew was extremely pleased with himself when he occasionally got it right. A more peculiar experience for a first-time user of mescaline would take no little time and ingenuity to devise.
The MP's eyes were alternately alive and entranced, and, even through the hazed-out filter of the black-and-white film, they sparkled in wonder at the beauty of his surroundings, or registered wild, amused bafflement at his inability to add a couple of numbers together. Most charmingly of all, he grinned brilliantly and with the shyness of a small boy startled at play by an adult as reality unravelled and he unsuccessfully attempted to subtract three from one hundred. In later stages of the interview, as Mayhew addressed the camera, his pupils flat, eerily blank discs of infinite blackness, he unnervingly lurched from sense to mystified incoherence and back, as he discussed time and space. ‘There is no absolute time, no absolute space, it is simply what we impose on outside space,' he intoned, right on the edge of either a psychedelic breakthrough, or his sanity.
It is one of the strangest pieces of television ever made, and, sadly, one never broadcast, though it would later be sampled by Scottish techno band the Shamen. The BBC consulted a selection of priests, philosophers and sundry other mystics and thinkers who rejected as invalid the experiences of blissful eternity that Mayhew reported. Mayhew himself offered a brilliant deconstruction of their logical fallacy and the primacy of lived experience when he reflected upon the experiment later in his life in the documentary LSD: The Beyond Within: ‘The psychiatrists afterwards, and common sense, they all said: "This is nonsense. You couldn't have had these experiences [of time expanding to eternity]. There was no time, as the film shows, there was no time for you to have them in." And the psychiatrists would speak and I accept this, they would say I was simply showing the symptoms of what they call the disintegration of the ego, and I accept that, too. At the same time, they didn't have the experience.'
The Mayhew experiment was among the first live ‘trip reports' ever undertaken, where a user of a psychoactive compound documents his experiences for the benefit – whether entertainment or education – of others. No lab will suffice, no brain tissues in culture; the mind is the test tube where the reaction takes place, and this experience would inform many explorers that followed him. The fact that this outlandish mental expedition was embarked upon by a distinguished British politician and an internationally respected scientist reveals much about the journey away from a more liberal British stance towards the dysfunctional model of drug prohibition that now prevails worldwide.
LSD remained legal for more than twenty years after its creation, since its users tended to be psychiatrists, scientists and, in the main, other serious-minded researchers. LSD's early users included James D. Watson and Francis Crick, who cracked the fundamental secret of life in March 1953 when they imagined the double helix form of DNA while under the influence of a small dose of the drug, have shaped society in ways unimaginable before its appearance.
Once it escaped the psychiatry ward and other medical institutions in the 1940s and 1950s, LSD was the first compound to enable mass drug use in the West during the 1960s. The mescaline eaten by Ellis was organic, natural and derived from peyote. Huxley, Osmond and Mayhew's hydrochloride was lab-made, but synthetic – and the dose was 400 mg. LSD was active at just 100 µg (micrograms). One small lab could produce enough LSD to dose millions of people. In America, the drug plotted a course from the clinic to the street, just as it would in the UK. Author Ken Kesey, and Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were among those who evangelized about the substance, believing its use would herald a new age of human consciousness. Owsley Stanley, the world's most exacting and prolific LSD chef who supplied the majority of America's West Coast with LSD in the 1960s, claimed he made so much acid not because he wanted to change the world, but rather because it was almost impossible not to make vast quantities of the drug once the synthesis had been embarked upon. This was also the moment when synthetic, laboratory-made drugs replaced plant-based compounds as the substances most commonly used recreationally, with the exception of marijuana.
Marijuana was in many ways the ultimate gateway drug for both users and lawmakers in the 1960s. Earlier in the twentieth century it had been the drug most widely used by the new black urban American underclass and, later, the mainly white beatnik counterculture. Laws forbidding its use in the US had originally been inspired by an influx of Mexican immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, who smoked marijuana recreationally. But the enthusiastic uptake of the drug by white, educated, middle-class American youths and students, and its association with the Vietnam- and draft-rejecting hippy counterculture, helped produce the Establishment conviction that drug-taking was a profound threat to society.
The streets and airwaves were flooded with the sights and sounds of psychedelia through the mid-to-late 1960s. In 1965, the Beatles slyly snuck a reference to their first LSD experience into their number one record, ‘Help!', in the curious lyric: ‘Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors'. Most of the UK had no idea what the drug was, or that it even existed, or that the Beatles had taken it. Neither did the Beatles, initially, since their drinks were spiked with it by their dentist after dinner one evening.9 But the drug soon entered the culture and it popularized, if not normalized, recreational drug use in that era and beyond, and revolutionized youth culture, sexual politics, music and art on both sides of the Atlantic. Times were changing; in Western Europe and the US drugs saturated everyday life.
LSD was banned in the UK in 1966. During the debate on legislating against the drug, even Britain's staid law lords revealed themselves to be strangely fascinated by it, with one, Lord Saltoun, asking, ‘May I ask the noble Lord whether LSD-25 is the drug that enables you to remember what happened when you were born?10 ‘He was pithily answered by Lord Stonham, ‘My Lords, I think that the hallucinatory effect created is not to enable you to remember back like that, but rather to forget and imagine that you are otherwise and elsewhere than you in fact are. But, of course, LSD is not the only substance that can create that illusion: I have known people who thought they could fly on four pints of bitter.' The Lords did not offer any evidence-based reasons for banning the drug; they merely mentioned newspaper reports of people jumping from buildings or into lakes after taking it, and a British Medical Journal editorial that said the drug should be banned just as amphetamine was.
LSD, mescaline and psilocybin were all banned that year, though there was little scientific proof of their physical harmfulness – bitter beer, meanwhile, remained legal. LSD was banned federally in the US in 1968 after the passage of the Staggers-Dodd Bill, which amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
In the 1960s, another synthetic drug had become popular in a more working-class context: speed. Amphetamines were the first drug other than alcohol and nicotine to be abused recreationally on a wide scale in the UK.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, amphetamines had been widely prescribed by doctors for fatigue, a fact that might go some way to explaining the gruesomely chipper and relentlessly chatty representation of the British squaddie in films of the era – over seventy million amphetamine tablets were used by British soldiers during the Second World War. Popular too with housewives looking for a break from drudgery or to lose weight, they were seldom used recreationally at this time, and supplies were either stolen from factories or diverted from legitimate prescriptions.
The mod cult, born in working-class districts around industrial centres, gained a foothold as conscription or National Service ended in 1960. These dapper working-class kids rejected post-war austerity for conspicuous consumption, their sharply tailored clothes and foreign motorcycles bought on credit. They forged what was to become a classic youth culture template: sexual freedom, new drugs, all-night dancing to music with alien, possibly African rhythms, and a wholesale and unwholesome disrespect for authority. They rejected booze as a drug for the old, the square, the badly dressed and those unable to dance stylishly, and presented the media with their first ready-made post-war drugs scandal. The UK government swiftly moved to ban amphetamines in 1964, with the main effects being a rapid increase in their use, and higher prices following a twenty-five per cent reduction in availability.
In the mid-1970s, the drug was popular with dancers in the north of England who found that the metronomic beat of classic American soul rocked harder still when jacked up on these banned pills and powders. Punks loved speed, too, the drug's aggression and stiletto-blade sharpness matching their staccato anti-funk, their jackhammer drums and three-chord rants, the perfect powdered fuck-you to the hippy dream of love, peace and self-indulgence and a stinging gob in the eye of goblin-obsessed prog-rockers. From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, other than a brief and ruinous flirtation with heroin in the latter decade, Britain's drug scene was restricted to this limited chemical palette of uppers and downers, acid and hash, and cocaine for the wealthy.
Cocaine had first become widely popular in America in its powdered form in the 1970s, and was ubiquitous among musicians and the wealthy as the acid daze came to an end. Discos of the era, such as New York's glamorous Studio 54, were packed with prancing celebrities with pristinely powdered noses, while the far funkier Loft, run by DJ David Mancuso, took dancers on an all-night journey into the light in a ritualized, almost ceremonial urban setting where LSD was the favoured intoxicant. For all their differences, the contexts in which these drugs were taken, though, were similar – polysexual, multi-racial, music-driven. The cocaine that powered such venues enriched Colombian narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar by three billion dollars in 1989, and the undoubted glamour of the scene was presumably lost on the thousands of Colombians slain by the smugglers. In the 1980s came crack, the more potent, smokeable form of the drug that has ravaged inner cities, where it found favour for its lower price and harder hit. As harder substances replaced psychedelics, problems associated with drug use grew, including addiction, overdoses and inner-city crime.
Drug laws had by this point been tightening for decades, both domestically and internationally. Ostensibly the legislation was introduced to protect the health of nations, and it is impossible to argue that many of the drugs banned worldwide today are not addictive, harmful or problematic if used to excess. Practically, though, it could be argued that the banning of drugs has been as much to do with notions of morality, and with the need for a sober and compliant workforce, as it has been to do with protection.
International drug law is today controlled by three United Nations treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971 – a draft of which was released in 1969 and served as a blueprint for later American and British drug laws – and the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988, which bans commonly used chemicals required to produce and synthesize illegal drugs. The vast majority of UN member states are signatories to these three conventions, and bound by law to criminalize the production, distribution, purchase, sale and possession of the hundreds of drugs they list for anything other than scientific or medical purposes.
In the UK, drugs are currently controlled by two Acts of Parliament, the 1968 Medicines Act and the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. It is the latter act that is usually cited in criminal drugs cases brought against individuals, and it prohibits the production, supply and use of hundreds of individually named compounds. It separates drugs into three classes, C, B and A, with progressively harsher punishments for those involved with drugs that are deemed to be more dangerous.
The US, a key driver in the internationalization of drug controls, consolidated decades of piecemeal legislation into the 1970 Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. It named specific drugs that were banned federally, and classified drugs into five different bands, or schedules, based upon their addiction potential, with corresponding punishments for each. On 17 June 1971, serpentine president Richard Nixon announced the start of formal hostilities as he fired the first shot of the War on Drugs: ‘Ladies and gentlemen: I would like to summarize for you the meeting that I have just had with the bipartisan leaders which began at eight o'clock and was completed two hours later. I began the meeting by making this statement, which I think needs to be made to the nation: America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.'11
The US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was established in 1973, with responsibility for enforcement of drug policy handed to the Justice Department rather than the Treasury, underlining the new political view of drug abuse: previously an economic crime of tax evasion, now it was framed as a socio-moral offence.
In a pattern that repeats to this day, drug laws actually exacerbated the social problems associated with drugs. It was the emergence of synthetic drugs from the 1960s onwards that enabled the creation of a mass market and a recreational drug counterculture, and that in turn was powered by the alchemical ability of chemists to produce drugs using nothing more than laboratory equipment and chemicals. But it was the act of banning substances for which demand was so high that made their manufacture, import and supply so disproportionately profitable – and popular. Drug laws have produced a situation where an ounce of gold, at around £1,000 in late 2012, costs about the same as an ounce of cocaine of average purity, which is a simple extract from a plant that grows wild with little attention. A kilo of crystal meth can be made for a few hundred dollars in Mexico, and is sold on the streets in individual deals for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The process by which drugs are banned in the UK has been guided, since 1971, by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). It is a twenty-strong committee with experts taken from many disciplines – pharmacology, toxicology, neurology, criminology, law, chemistry and many more – whose job is to assess a drug's harms via a process that draws on their collective expertise. This involves dozens of scientific procedures, and it can take many months to come to their conclusions; when they do, they recommend the best course of government action. It is not currently possible under British law simply to ban a compound because it has a psychoactive effect.
Even in the first few years after the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act came into force, rogue chemists were pushing at its boundaries. Laws around drug use and drug chemistry tend to be highly complex, and suppliers will always find ways to sidestep the legislation.
In 1975, a chemist in the Midlands had been churning out ring substitutions on illegal drugs, making hallucinogens and stimulants that did not feature in the Act. Specifically, he had been making a designer drug named bromo-STP, a potent hallucinogen. Police had found this and other new designer drugs on the streets, and the ACMD had recommended that it be banned. Britain uses a generic model of drug categorization and control, and so the government asked the ACMD to look at the drugs the Midlands chemist was making and to extrapolate from there the likely steps he or others might take next, using their collected chemical knowledge to suggest a law that might pre-empt such steps.
John Ramsey, chief toxicologist at St George's, University of London, explains the process. ‘When the government is trying to write a new drug law, advisors to the legislators are asked to try and guess what other compounds might be made by chemists in order to get around the legislation they are trying to put in pace. If you didn't do that, it'd be like having a speed limit just for blue cars, when you want a speed limit for all cars,' he says.
In the UK in 1977, the House of Lords met to debate these proposed changes to the Act, which sought to outlaw many dozens of variations on the basic tryptamine and phenethylamine structures. ‘The Council took note of the fact that further substances of a like nature but which would not be caught by the entries in the Schedule to the Act could be synthesized with relative simplicity by making minor molecular changes to the basic structure of the chemical,' said Lord Wells-Pestell on 20 June 1977 in the House of Lords. ‘The Council accordingly instructed its Technical Sub-Committee to explore the possibility of closing the door on the production of such substances for misuse purposes, but with the minimum interference with possible legitimate medical and research use, by controlling all possible variations in each series by means of a generic description, or formula.'12
He then asked his learned friends to forgive him for what he was about to say next. He was attempting to communicate major and complex new proposed changes to Britain's drug laws. The chemical relay race was about to begin in earnest, with lawmakers attempting to keep up with a discipline – or a crime – they barely understood and which, even then, was quicker and more responsive than the legislative process. ‘The Technical Sub-Committee found that the particular compounds which produced undesirable hallucinogenic effects fell into two categories. First, compounds derived from tryptamine, or from ring-hydroxy tryptamines which have been substituted at the nitrogen atom of the side chain by an alkyl group or groups. Examples of this category which are already controlled under the Act are psilocin and psilocybin.The second category was that of compounds derived from phenethylamine by alkyl or other substitution in the aromatic ring. Examples of this category which are already controlled under the Act are mescaline, and STP and Bromo STP to which I have already referred.'
Lord Platt concurred, and thanked Wells Pestell for his work, and spoke for everyone present when he confessed his mystification. ‘My Lords, it is customary for the layman to associate the doctor with some supernatural powers. I should like to assure noble Lords that there is not one doctor in thousands who understands the exact nature of these drugs. The noble Lord has made clear to us the reasons for this order and the kinds of substances which are included in it. I should like to support it.'
This judgment led to a ban on drugs such as MDMA in the UK long before they ever became available here, and dozens of other drugs, in a similar fashion, at one stroke. But it did not ban all of the new possibilities. A precedent was set and a cycle began.
Whatever your stance on their efficacy and fairness, Britain's drug laws have historically been subtle, intelligent and complex pieces of legislation that draw on the expertise of many different strands of science. The United States has a different method of legislating around designer drugs, one which bans compounds on the loosely defined basis of their effects and similarity to banned drugs, which is discussed in full in the next chapter.
But subtle or not, all of these laws were written in an era before mass communications – before most homes even had a telephone line or a colour television, when news came a few times a day on screens and twice a day on paper. They were drafted in an age when air freight costs were prohibitively high for individuals, in an age when communication with distant, communist China was so slow as to be impossible. When they were created, computers were room-sized, and were owned in the main by governments. They were first written, that is to say, almost half a century before the web was born. These laws were made five decades before the creation of an entirely new drug whose effect on users would be different from that of LSD, but equally profound. This drug would leak into the global water table on a scale that would have given even the most extreme LSD evangelist pause for thought.
One individual, allied with technology, would be a central figure in this new race between chemists, users, the culture and the law: American Alexander Shulgin, the world's most prolific and genius-tinged psychedelic chemist, the godfather of Ecstasy.
Copyright © 2013 by Mike Power
