ENVISIONING USES FOR HALLUCINOGENS

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.

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.

Furst suggests the Huichol once lived in the peyote-rich region but moved
to avoid enemies or find more food.

Many other native North Americans used peyote as well as some more potent
and dangerous drugs. An herb called datura has been used for coming-of-age
ceremonies, Furst said. 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.

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."

When the Spanish invaded Mexico, they labeled peyote the "diabolic root,"
Furst said, and tried to stamp out its use. In the 1960s, peyote achieved a
cult following. After a long legal battle, Furst said, peyote was legalized
in 1994 in the United States for members of certain American Indian religions.

Arizona's Winkelman said he believes there is something in human biology
that makes us want to reach for such altered states. And one infamous
incident known as the Good Friday Experiment seemed to show you didn't have
to practice shamanism to have a spiritual experience with hallucinogens.

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.

People use the term hallucinogen loosely to apply to many mind-altering
drugs, but peyote belongs to a small family that share similar modes of
action on the brain. They include psilocybin, LSD, and morning glory seeds.

The chemical structure of these resembles a critical messenger molecule in
the brain known as serotonin, said David Nichols, professor of medicinal
chemistry and pharmacology at Purdue University. When serotonin is created
in the brain it works by attaching, lock-and-key fashion, to molecules
called serotonin receptors.

The brain has 14 different types of serotonin receptors, said Nichols, and
the hallucinogenic substances dock in just one of these, called the 5HT2a
receptor. "You get the overstimulation of one receptor at the expense of
the others," he 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.

Studies like the Good Friday Experiment ended after psilocybin and other
hallucinogens were made illegal in the late 1960s and early '70s, but a
handful of scientists today are looking at ways these types of drugs might
help people.

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 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

"I've never seen any harm coming from this. In fact it's just the opposite
- - it really brings families together," he said.

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."