INTERNET OFFERS INFO ON HALLUCINOGENS: STUDY

NEW YORK: Forget about textbooks on addiction and psychiatry having the
most up-to-date and comprehensive information about hallucinogens. Instead,
it seems that the Internet can provide everything anyone would want to know
about how to acquire, manufacture, extract, identify, and use an enormous
range of hallucinogenic agents--and little in the way of anti-drug messages.

Dr. John H. Halpern of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts and Dr.
Harrison G. Pope, Jr. of Harvard Medical School in Boston used the Yahoo
Internet search engine to locate 81 hallucinogen-related sites. They detail
their findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry for March.

"Many sites are quite sophisticated in terms of Web design, with rave-like
music and dancing, psychedelic colours," Halpern said.

The researchers found information on commercially available legal
hallucinogenic plants. They learned how to extract mescaline and the
hallucinogens dimethyltryptamine and 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine from
common plant sources. They read recipes for synthesising "essentially all
of the hallucinogens listed in Schedule I (the federal government's
controlled substances), as well as numerous nonscheduled hallucinogen analogs."

Some sites sell Psilocybe cubensis mushroom spores and other hallucinogenic
plant materials. One site gives directions to "choice foraging fields."
Another "lists drug prices for small towns and big cities all over world,"
Halpern noted.

In contrast, the investigators found very little in the way of anti-drug
messages. What was there was inadequate, Halpern said.

For example, "the Drug Enforcement Administration site says hallucinogenic
mushrooms are from Central America and Latin America; it makes no mention
that they occur domestically," he said. "At the same time, another web
site, which has gotten thousands of hits, tells people how to find out
which foraging fields in the US exist naturally."

The goal in writing this article, Halpern said, was to "get all of us
talking about it. It's out there--more people have tried hallucinogens than
cocaine in recent years."