Adventures Through Inner Space

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 centered 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 millennia, but have 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 behaviors 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 (Rick Doblin's Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and the Heffter Reseach Institute (headed up by Dave Nichols), as well as individual researchers like Rick Strassman and the U.K.'s Karl Jansen, have done their homework, balancing loopy subjective accounts with the dry, methodical language of protocols, pharmacology, and action studies. Hopefully, these modest research reports are laying the groundwork for a resumption of the kind of official in-depth psychological studies squelched over thirty years ago.

Meanwhile, in the far margins of legality, small crews of brave, compulsive, and sometimes wacked 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 hobbyists of neural R&D. They like to plunge as far as any hippie into the bejeweled 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 Burning Man veterans may not have heard of many of the esoteric compounds that float around the scene: AMT, 5-MEO-DMT, 2C-T-2, 2C-T-7, 5-MEO-DIPT, 4-Acetoxy-DiPT, DPT, DOB, 2-CB. 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 the Feds and remain uncontrolled. However, because the vast majority of these substances are chemically similar to illegal drugs, people gobbling them technically can 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.