“The principle of conservation6 tends to rigidly preserve established schemes and patterns,” writes Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini in his book Animals and Psychedelics, “but modification (the search for new pathways) requires a depatterning instrument . . . capable of opposing—at least at certain determined moments—the principle of conservation. It is my impression that drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior, on the part of both humans and animals, enjoys an intimate connection with . . . depatterning.”
