HALLUCINOGENS COULD UNLOCK MYSTERY OF THE BRAIN

Some Debate Practical Uses Of Ancient Practice

Long before Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and the counterculture
generation discovered hallucinogenic drugs, the Indians of western
Mexico were using peyote to commune with their gods.

Anthropologist Peter T. Furst, who spent 30 years among the Huichol
people, says that Indian shamans have been using hallucinogenic plants
as a doorway to the divine for thousands of years, likely following a
tradition carried by their ancestors over the Bering Strait.

And now, some U.S. scientists are exploring how these substances might
be used by doctors to battle anxiety, mental illness and alcoholism.

"These compounds hold tremendous potential for helping us understand
how the brain functions, and they have untapped potential for
healing," said Charles Grob, a psychiatry professor at UCLA Medical
School.

Some early studies suggest that LSD can ease the sense of dread that
people feel when they are dying. "There were some very interesting and
promising results," said Grob. He recently secured approval from the
Food and Drug Administration to continue this line of inquiry using
the milder drug psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic
mushrooms.

"We're really on the threshold of a new era of formal and very tightly
controlled sanctioned studies with hallucinogens to study their safety
and efficacy," Grob said.

An ancient practice

In Philadelphia, a new show on peyote-inspired Huichol art opened this
month at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and
Archaeology. Furst, curator of the exhibition, said these are
religious images, created with the ritual use of the cactus plant.

"There's a difference in nature between people who use this for
religion and those who are part of our counterculture," said Furst,
81. A German-born Jew, he moved to England and then the United States
in the 1930s. A vaguely European accent gives him a serious,
professorial air.

After writing for Stars and Stripes during World War II, Furst worked
as a journalist for United Press before studying cultural
anthropology. He made a specialty of studying shamanistic peoples and
wrote numerous books, including "Hallucinogens and Culture."

He maintains that nearly all hunter-gatherer societies practiced
shamanistic religions, which often used hallucinogens or other
mind-altering techniques to see gods, the underworld, the meaning of
life.

Though he left the Penn museum a few years ago to live in Santa Fe,
Furst returned this month for the opening of the exhibit, "Mythic
Visions," a display of a Huichol artform known as yarn painting. In
depicting complex arrays of dancing deer, snakes and other figures,
the artist tries to evoke the visions he experiences with peyote.

Small bands of Huichol travel for 300 miles to a desolate spot deep in
the Chihuahuan desert to hunt for the squat, round peyote cactus.
Furst said he participated in Huichol peyote hunts and ceremonies and
found the plant extraordinarily unpalatable.

Archaeological finds in Texas show remnants of peyote that date back
around 7,000 years. Even earlier finds show a hallucinogenic seed
associated with remains of giant mastodons and other Pleistocene
animals that go back at least 10,000 years.

Furst said he believed it was likely the Huichol and other tribes
brought a tradition of hallucinogen use from Siberia before they
entered the Americas more than 15,000 years ago.

'Divine inspiration'

Others see evidence for shamanism in early Europe. "Shamanism emerged
at least 40,000 years ago and is reflected in Paleolithic rock art,"
said Michael Winkelman, an anthropologist from Arizona State
University. "Not all societies depended on hallucinogenic plants but
where they found them, people built up institutions around these
substances," he said. "They are seen as a source of divine
inspiration."

On Good Friday 1962, some researchers at Harvard gave a small group of
divinity students either psilocybin or a placebo. Psilocybin, then
legal, works much like peyote. "Eight of the nine people who got the
drug reported they had had the most profound spiritual experiences of
their lives," Winkelman said.

Hallucinogens act on receptors in the frontal cortex, sometimes called
the executive part of the brain because it's used for higher
reasoning, he said. They also act on a part of the brain called the
thalamus, Nichols said, which works to help us distinguish what's
novel and important. That may explain why people on LSD can become
mesmerized by a flower or by their own hand.

Effect on alcoholism

John Halpern, associate director of substance abuse research at
Harvard University and McLean Hospital, is investigating the
possibility that peyote prevents alcoholism in American Indians.

In a study he plans to publish within the next several months, he
compared cognitive and psychological health measures among Indians who
were alcoholics, those who regularly used peyote, and those who used
no drugs or alcohol.

Halpern said he can't reveal his study's results yet, but he will say
he sees no evidence that peyote damages the brain. "There's no history
of it being addictive, or trafficked or abused," he said. Peyote can
be dangerous if people use it to get stoned and then do stupid things,
he said, but that's not what happens in religious ceremonies.

Others, such as David Murray of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy in Washington, see more serious risk. Working among the Navajo,
he said, he found long-term peyote use was "counterproductive to
education and social mobility."

Because the peyote comes from a natural plant, he said, "you're taking
in a powerful chemical stew," with some toxins in addition to the
psychoactive ingredient. "It is, without question, a risky
undertaking."