Ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs

Abstract

These two volumes bring together two very different eras of psychedelic studies, its early florescence in the 1960s and a current wave reflecting cumulative developments fifty years later. Both are based on conferences sharing the same title given to the book, an open exploration of the potential for modern science and medicine to engage with the pharmacological abundance provided by nature and embodied in the remnants of shamanic entheogenic traditions. The first volume covers an international conference including researchers from diverse fields – psychiatry, medicine, botany, pharmacology, chemistry and anthropology – that came together in San Francisco in 1967 for three days under what might have been seen as auspicious circumstances – a conference sponsored by agencies of the US government, the National Institute of Mental Health and US Public Health Service. The second volume is the compilation of 21 papers presented 50 years later in 2017 when an even more diverse group of scholars came together to share some of the new findings that emerged since the first conference, reflecting the psychedelics renaissance that emerged in the 21st century during a stifling decades long War on Drugs funded by the same government that sponsored the first conference 50 years ago. As the second volume shows, in spite of such draconian repression, the field of ethnopharmacological psychedelic studies has progressed to the point that we are now able to discuss the numerous discoveries of the therapeutic potential of these diverse substances in spite of their continued stigmatization. The first conference included a who’s who of 20th century psychedelic research with such famous stalwarts as Richard Evans Schultes, Gordon Wasson, Claudio Naranjo, Alexander Shulgin, and Daniel Freedman, but the majority of the participants are probably but historical footnotes to their 21st century intellectual descendants. Their presentations at this conference, however, are immortalized in this publication, first released in 1967 as Public Health Service Publication No. 1645 by the US Government Printing Office under the editorship of Daniel Efron, Bo Holmstedt and Nathan Kline. While the conference was dominated by US researchers, the international scope of the participants was reflected in researchers from Russia, Argentina, Mexico, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. Efron’s preface alludes to issues still important and unresolved in the study of psychedelics such as the origins of humans’ psychotropic plant use and the identity of the psychoactive plants referred to in the Bible. Efron’s naivety is evident however, where he wonders if this Biblical drug use “brought happiness and comfort, or new problems, aggravations, and unhappiness” (p. ix). Apparently Efron’s memory of Sunday school teachings had faded as Genesis clearly tells us that the gods were definitely displeased with humans taking the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, and fearing that humans would also use this knowledge to partake of the Tree of Immortality, the gods banished Adam and Eve from an idyllic Eden and sent them to toil and suffer in the outside world. Seems like this early engagement with psychotropics provoked the first war on drugs! The focus of the conference was however, not on such weighty theological issues but on the importance of knowledge about plant compounds, the ethnopharmacological search for Journal of Psychedelic Studies