ADVENTURES THROUGH INNER SPACE

"Psychonauts" are experimenting with strange new drugs to expand our ideas
about human consciousness

Let's say you're a buttoned-down organic-chemistry jockey at Merck. One day
you tweak a molecule ripped off from a Peruvian native medicine, and you
wind up with a powerfully psychoactive compound.

Instead of squelching anxiety, instilling a reliable boner, or giving young
minds that magic amphetamine edge, the drug helps you touch the hem of God
- - or, at least, something a lot like the hem of God.

At times it hurtles you into a blazing hieroglyphic phantasmagoria more
sublime and gorgeously bizarre than anything on the demo reels of Hollywood
FX shops.

On other occasions it leads you to the lip of a fundamental insight into
the dance of form and emptiness.

And though later attempts to communicate your insight founder on the shoals
of coherence, the experience still leaves you centred and convinced that
ordinary life is fed by deeper springs.

Now, you think you'd zero in on this molecule, not only as a potential
vector into the enigma of consciousness but as the basis for some really
interesting commercial drugs.

In other words, you'd be psyched.

Right?

No way. It's common knowledge that such molecules have been recognized and
consumed by people for millenia, but they've been effectively banished from
the scientific mindscape of the West. Despite their mighty psycho-spiritual
effects, the potential insight they might provide into the mind, and the
largely non-addictive behaviours they elicit, psychedelic drugs like LSD,
psilocybin, mescaline, ketamine, and DMT have been crudely lumped into the
same legal and socio-cultural categories as speedballs and crank.

And one result of this social policy is a withering of the research
strategies that a rational civilization is supposed to bring to bear on the
conundrums it confronts.

Despite the continued ferocity of the "war on drugs" and the largely
foolish ideas about psychoactive substances it pushes, the last decade has
seen a small renaissance in psychedelic research, both above and
underground. On the official stage, advocacy groups like MAPS (the
Florida-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and
the Heffter Research Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as
individual researchers, have all done their homework, balancing loopy
subjective accounts with the dry, methodical language of protocols,
pharmacology, and action studies.

These modest research reports are laying the groundwork for a resumption of
the kind of official in-depth psychological studies squelched over 30 years
ago.

Meanwhile, in the far margins of legality, small crews of brave,
compulsive, and sometimes whacked-out individuals continue to compile and
share fact, anecdote, and lore about exotic and new-fangled psychoactives
and the even more exotic combinations they allow.

Think of these so-called "psychonauts" as hobbyist of neural R&D. They like
to plunge as far as any hippie into the bejewelled halls of hyperspace, but
they also bring an almost geeky spirit of investigation to their exploits.
They know their chemistry, and understand that the envelope of psychedelic
pharmacology is pushed by recombining existing molecular Tinkertoys. They
also take this recombinant logic a step further by mixing and matching
different drugs from an ever-widening pharmacopoeia in order to craft new
highs.

Even veterans of the Burning Man festival may not have heard of many of the
esoteric compounds that float around the scene: AMT, 5-MEO-DMT, 2CT-2,
2CT-7, 5-MEO-DIPT, 4-Acetoxy-DIPT, DPT, DOB, 2CB. With a few exceptions,
these white powders have largely resisted being branded with cool names.

Some have been known for decades, others are relatively new; a few have
been scheduled, but many have so far been overlooked by police agencies and
remain uncontrolled. However, because the vast majority of these substances
are chemically similar to illegal drugs, in the U.S. people gobbling them
can technically be snagged under the Federal Analog Act, which allows
individuals to be prosecuted for recreational use of drugs that are
"substantially similar" to scheduled drugs. But this rarely seems to
happen, especially given the obscurity of many of these drugs and the
difficulties involved in proving "substantial" similarity.

It's impossible to say how many grams of these compounds are being
synthesized and consumed annually, but there's probably morsels of intrigue
all over Europe and America. Though some demand complex procedures and
elusive precursors to synthesize, the lion's share can be cooked up by most
anyone with undergrad training in chemistry and access to a lab. There's
really nothing to stop curious amateur organic chemists from brewing up a
small batch of AMT or 2-CB in a weekend to share with a small circle of
friends, and anecdotal evidence indicates that many do. Some of these
modern alchemists even exploit the grey-market status of these compounds by
marketing them for non-human "research purposes" over the Internet.

The back-room circulation of these drugs has engendered a loose-knit and
rather hermetic psychedelic scene devoted less to partying or cosmic
communion than to a kind of weird science, where the purple haze is
filtered through a knowledge and respect for methyl groups, monoamine
oxidase inhibitors, and the value of keeping your eye on the clock.

The godfather of this particular psychedelic style is Alexander Shulgin, a
cheery, eccentric San Francisco-area chemist best known for the rediscovery
of MDMA. With his wife, Ann, he wrote PIHKAL and TIHKAL, two phone-book
size tomes devoted, respectively, to phenethylamines and tryptamines, the
two pillars of psychedelic pharmacology. Though Shulgin once had a license
to study scheduled drugs, an irritated U.S. Drug Enforcement Ageny
responded to the publication of PIHKAL by swooping down on Shulgi's grubby
lab and slapping him with 51 violations they then effectively swapped for
his license.

In reaction, Shulgin simply continued to devote himself to the art of
recombination that characterizes the synthesis of novel molecules. "Once
they schedule something, I throw away my samples and continue my research
in another direction," he says.

The creator of 2C-B and 2CT-7, two drugs popular among psychonauts, Shulgin
has described, synthesized, and analyzed scores of substances whose
potential for thrills and profit remain untapped.

Many of the hundreds of compounds described in PIHKAL and TIHKAL are duds;
others are actively unfun. 2C-B, on the other hand, has gained quite a
following for its electric visuals and mescaline-like effects, while the
more esoteric 2CT-7 can unleash a hyperactive barrage of 3-D psychedelic
imagery that can take some users to the edge of delirium.

Dosage, of course matters greatly, but dosages are by nature provisional in
this scene - one psychonaut recently died after snorting an ungodly amount
of 2CT-7. Still, even at the right amounts, it could turn out that nothing
in the Shulgin universe will ever match the depth of LSD, mushrooms, or
DMT. But the genie is out of the bottle. "I find postings about compounds
that are slipped away in little corners of my books," says Shulgin. "And
all of a sudden they are commercially available and people are talking
about them. The seeds are all in there."

To no one's surprise, the weird scientists have embraced the Internet,
which links the gossamer strands of data and debate necessary to support a
shadowy and fragmented community that needs to stay informed.

Sites like the Vaults of Erowid (www.erowid.org) and the Lycaeum
(www.lycaeum.org) provide loads of information on dosages, chemistry, legal
status, effects, and, perhaps most importantly, experiential feedback.

The problem is that such public information also runs the risk of killing
the scene, especially when kids get into the act. "The more people know
about what's going on, the more likely somebody is to come in and try to
squash it," explains Scotto, one of the more balls-out contributors to
Erowid's growing vault of reports.

At the same time, the persistent curiosity of psychonauts and the endless
potential for pharmacological novelty may have created a perpetually
expanding zone of grey-market psychedelia. "Humans are going to keep
inventing these things faster than the government's going to make them
illegal," says Scotto, pointing out that the efflorescence of esoteric
synthetic compounds mocks the "logic" of the ware on drugs. "Are we going
to reach the point where I can be imprisoned for doing 20 milligrams of
4-acetoxy diisopropyltryptamine in my bathtub, when nobody even knows what
that fucking is? What kind of culture is that?"

I'll tell you what kind of culture that is: a post-human one.

This might seem like a tall claim.

After all, if you take a random slice of human history, you can pretty much
bank on the existence of some popular and dependable pharmacological route
toward altered states of consciousness, whether through snuff, brews, bark,
or herbs.

What makes the coming drug culture truly post-human is the historically
novel conjuction of our expanding knowledge of psychopharmacology, the
growing dominance of reductionist accounts of the mind, and a consumer
culture increasingly focused on what some have called the "experience economy."

According to Earch, who runs the Vaults of Erowid with his
also-psuedonymous partner Fire, we ain't seen nothin' yet. "In the next 50
years, virtually everyone in developed countries will be faced with daily
decisions about their psychoactive drug use," he says. He arguesthat the
number of psychoactive chemicals in our midst is about to explode, the work
not so much of underground drug designers as of pharmaceutical companies.
"Imagine a thousand caffeine replacements," says Earth. "Myriad
amphetamines, though less fun than ones today.

Or, like Viagra, a coming class of psuedo-medicinal recreational drugs."

The signs of this emerging culture are around us. Just ask subway and train
riders across the U.S. what time it is, and they'll tell you: "It's
Prilosec time!" The garish $50-million direct-to-consumer ad campaign for
the "little purple pill" is a remarkable indication of the shift toward a
mainstream embrace of psychoactive enhancement. Though you can't generally
tell from the ads, the drug itself is indicated for nothing more
interesting than heartburn.

But the marketing machine presents Prilosec as a lifestyle drug, a kind of
luxurious soma, floating against azure skies.

Look at the connotations: the "little pill" is a microdot, the color a
purple haze, and the image of the witchy New Age blonde exulting before the
clock an ambiguous symbol of the slice of eternity that the greatest
psychoactives promise - Eliot's "intersection of the timeless with time",
hovering over hasty commuters.

Ordinary drugs can promise such magic in part because we have so thoroughly
adoped the notion that our subjective experience is largely, if not
exclusively, a products of the activity of neural tissue.

It's a 19th-century idea, of course, but now we have 21st-century tools to
back it up, not to mention a 21st-century identity crisis for marketeers to
exploit.

The thing is, if you push this reductionist paradigm far enough, then we
are always on drugs.

In other words, once you start aligning the subcomponents of selfhood with
different rafts of neurotransmitters, you are already on the way toward
reconceiving your experience as the product of a tumultuous cocktail of
chemical triggers. When you hit the treadmill or string a full-spectrum
light above your desk in order to ward off depression, not to mention pop a
Prozac, you are in some sense treating your own neural juices as internal
drugs whose flows you want to regulate.

And this makes perfect sense.

After all, the brain already makes its own equivalents of opium, cocaine
and psychedelics.

So we're all druggies now. The problem is that we also live at a time when
the official lies and obfuscations about psychoactives, which are necessary
to justify the drug war and the multibillion-dollar industries it breeds,
have the additional effect of eroding the personal responsibility necessary
to weigh costs and benefits and make choices about how we dose ourselves.
"Prohibition has broken people's ability to manage their own psychoactive
use," says Earth. "We've created a culture that can't choose." Instead, we
are offered a simpleminded and historically insupportable view of "bad"
psychoactive drugs as malefic invaders whose presence in human brains and
human societiesis somehow aberrant. At the same time, people are being
encouraged to take socially approved psychoactives (or, in the case of
Ritalin, force them on their children). Rather than calling a spade a
spade, however, the medical-industrial establishment coats these pills in
"objective" rhetoric that elides the irreducibly subjective dimensions of
the drug encounter. From industry's perspective, psychoactives are not
presented as avenues for modifying your own subjectivity, giving you the
opportunity to explore pleasure or insight or calm, but as technical
solutions to "syndromes" within the fixed machinery of the bodymind.

The paradox of psychedelics - which is partly a source of their continued
subversive power, despite the fact that pop culture has already become so
thoroughly trippy - is that they simultaneously materialize and
spiritualize the problem of drugs and consciousness.

On the surface level, they seem to support a reductive model, especially
against traditional religious accounts of subjectivity That is,
psychedelics seem to prove that some of the most exalted states of the
human spirit - cosmic communion, profound aesthetic appreciation for
nature, the integration of self and other, the perception of primary
pattern, the visionary eruption of archetypal phantasms, the illumination
of memory - can be triggered with a pill or a plant.

But from the inside, so to speak, these very same states often seem to
unambiguously support a profoundly spiritual, or at least
consciousness-centred point of view, over and against a mere biological
reductionism. In other words, they bring us to the edge of a spiritual
materialism.

Even if you discount this subjective "evidence" as untrustworthy, the
profund reflexivity of psychedelic drugs still makes itself known through
the famed role that "set and setting" play in the phenomenology of the
trip. Forty years ago, long vefore he went Sci-Fi, Timothy Leary was
laready talking about the programmability of psychedelic experience,
arguing that the individual's frame of mind and the surrounding mise en
scene contribute substantially to the experience - a point that most later
researchers only further emphasize.

This acknowledgement profoundly changes the model of mind that emerges from
the drug, becuase the attempt to purely mechanize the molecule - to see it
as producing a small range of dependable perceptions and behaviours -
founders on the enormous role that both culture and the psyche play in
shaping the trip.

The dominant drug paradigm, in the rhetoric of drug warriors and industry
pushers alike, depends on a very literalist model that ascribes agency to
the drug itself.

Psychoactive drugs challenge this model, junctioning more like keys that
open doors that you walk through. "The psychedelic drug doesn't do
anything," says Shulgin. "The drug allows you to do something." At the same
time, of course, the drug definitely has its own say in the matter of what
gets done. But the act of introducing the thing to your synapses, and hence
your life, is more like initiating a relationship than simply jacking into
cyberspace through a video-game deck. Many psychnauts naturally think of
drugs as allies - even approaching traditional organic psychedelics like
mushrooms and ayahuasca as if they were ensouled by ancient spirits. Many
of these more explicitly "shamanic" trippers in turn denigrate synthetic,
lab-produced compounds as soulless industrial chemicals.

But as the weird scientists point out, this is just mainstream literalism
in reverse.

The point is not the material; it's the dialogic relationship, the loop of
meaning, that ties together mind adn molecuel. Indeed, much of the appeal
of novel chemicals is that they deliver one to zones that have yet to be
mapped by cultural consensus, underground or not. "I start with bottles
that have no personality at all," says Shulgin. "You make a white crystal
solid that you don't know and it doesn't know you. And so you begin to meet
each other." In some sense, this structure of relationship, which is open
to meaning and communication, applies to all psychoactives, even the most
mainstream. Like all relaitonships, they can go terrible, terribly wrong;
like most, they are mixed bags. And yet, to experience yourself as a mind
arising from a brain means that you are already constantly in relation with
neurochemistry. And in the years to come, when the expanding range of
molecular modification may wrap our hands ever tighter around the tiller of
the self, it might serve us well to keep in touch with the mind that moves
through realms far outside that anxious simian serotonin buzz we experience
as ordinary reality.