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Terence McKenna, for example, suggest that our apelike ancestors imitated other animals by eating things that caused unusual behavior.
This is part of McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory
Archaeologists have uncovered ancient African images of mushrooms sprouting from a human body,
The Church effectively suppressed information about the use of those materials in both the Old and New Worlds and persecuted bearers and practitioners of that knowledge.
Psychedelics were competion for the church
Freud himself was strongly attracted to mind-altering drugs such as cocaine and tobacco, his students were less so.
Hofmann nearly overdosed himself with what he thought was too small a quantity to possibly be mind-altering: a quarter milligram.
The presence and function of serotonin in the brain and in animal behavior clinched its role as the first known neurotransmitter.
In some experimental situations, LSD blocked the effects of serotonin; in others, the psychedelic drug mimicked serotonin’s effects.
LSD’s extraordinary sensory and emotional properties resulted from changing the function of brain serotonin in specific and understandable ways,
it might be possible to “chemically dissect” particular mental functions into their basic physiological components.
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The highly publicized abandonment of scientific research principles by Timothy Leary, Ph.D., and his research team at Harvard University ultimately resulted in their dismissals.
If Leary hadn't done this, psychotherapy would be 50 years farther than it is now.
The media exaggerated and emphasized psychedelic drugs’ negative physical and psychological effects.
According to Selco, the media is the most dangerous enemy
Subsequent publications cleared psychedelics from serious toxicity, including chromosome damage. However, these follow-up studies generated much less fanfare than did the original damaging reports.
Psychedelics were the growth area in psychiatry for over twenty years. Now young physicians and psychiatrists know nearly nothing about them.
This goes back to Leary making it into a party drug.
This never happened with the psychedelic drugs. Instead, their study went through a highly unnatural evolution. They began as “wonder drugs,” turned into “horror drugs,” then became nothing.
Set is our own makeup, both long term and immediate. It is our past, our present, and our potential future; our preferences, ideas, habits, and feelings. Set also includes our body and brain.
Some don’t even use the word drug, preferring instead molecule, compound, agent, substance, medicine, or sacrament.
This has been apparent in several documentaries about psychedelics
The multitude of labels reflects the deep-seated and ongoing debate about psychedelic drugs and their effects.
This was after he listed two pages of different names for LSD
Thus, what we call a drug we take, or give, influences our expectations of what that drug will do.
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It also modifies the effects themselves, and how we interpret and deal with them. No other drug’s name feeds back so powerfully upon the responses they elicit as do the psychedelics, because they greatly magnify our suggestibility.
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There are two main chemical families of psychedelic drugs: the phenethylamines and the tryptamines.
The phenethylamines build upon the “parent compound” phenethylamine.
The best-known phenethylamine is mescaline,
Another famous phenethylamine is MDMA,
Tryptamine is a derivative of tryptophan, an amino acid present in our diet.
Serotonin is a tryptamine—5-hydroxy-tryptamine, to be exact
It contains one more oxygen atom than does tryptamine. DMT is also a tryptamine and is the simplest psychedelic.
Serotonin has the oxygen molecule and is not a psychedelic.
Simply add two methyl groups to the tryptamine molecule and the result is “di-methyl-tryptamine”: DMT.
So DMT is a double LSD molecule
Psilocin differs from DMT by only one oxygen.
Psilocybin is converted into psilocin in the body
Another more basic aspect of pharmacology is “mechanism of action,” or how drugs affect brain activity.
twenty or so different types of serotonin receptors
Different psychedelics attach to different receptors
These multiple docking sites for serotonin exist in high concentrations on nerve cells in brain areas regulating a host of important psychological and physical processes:
William Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch, was one of the earliest field users of DMT.
DMT is the simplest of the tryptamine psychedelics.
Compared to other molecules, DMT is rather small. Its weight is 188 “molecular units,”
the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. I know of no other psychedelic drug that the brain treats with such eagerness.
The widespread presence of MAO is why DMT effects are so short-lived.
just as likely as the theory that these worlds exist “only in our minds” is that they are, in reality, “outside” of us and freestanding.
the mysterious pineal gland. In its role as a potential “spirit gland,” or producer of endogenous DMT,
Descartes believed that the pineal gland played an essential role in the expression of the soul:
the pineal gland does not originate from brain tissue, it exists outside the blood-brain barrier
melatonin contributes to the early morning drop in body temperature.
One of the most robust is body temperature, in which there is a sharp dip at 3 A.M.
This also is when melatonin levels are highest.
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Individuals with schizophrenia received pineal gland extracts as an experimental treatment in the 1960s.
Their symptoms improved markedly. The explanation for this finding was that the pineal extracts provided patients with an additional dose of the anti-DMT that their own pineal glands lacked.
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Researchers have found that the methyltransferase enzymes that form DMT are more active in schizophrenia than in normal conditions.
MAO is less efficient in schizophrenics
it may be that schizophrenics do not clear DMT quickly enough from their systems.
If DMT first entered the blood, MAO enzymes would destroy it long before it returned to the brain to exert its profound mental effects.
This is why DMT cannot be taken orally
It takes forty-nine days from conception for the first signs of the human pineal to appear.
In a fetus. This corrilates to the Buddhist belief that the soul returns after 49 days.
