Dr Richard Evans Schultes’ Extraordinary Research with Amazonian Shamans
The incredible Amazonian expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes made this Harvard University researcher a legend of ethnobotany, and brought us a wealth of knowledge about Indigenous culture and plant medicine use.
How to Change your mind is a fantastic book.
Most books which talk about drugs are written by overzealous, hippy types who claim to have seen the light. This was the first time that a serious yet entertaining author like Pollan reported on a controversial subject. I particularly liked his gonzo form of reporting.
The speculative stuff around this is super fun. Proceed at your own risk.
How does an animal stumble on the existence of geometry? Impaired sensory input creates feedback loops that yield periodic patterns. How does it begin apprehend the scope of something greater than its senses? Impairing those senses and seeing the edges. How do ancient people hear supposedly divine messages? Inhaling smoke from burning plants that contain substances that cause said impairment, like if a common regional bush that contained these substances caught fire, on a mountain somewhere, just randomly. If the knowledge from this tree that contained this chemical were forbidden, how would you preserve it? Rituals, symbols, allegories, etc. Who would forbid it and why?
Bonkers fun! I should pitch the Ancient Aliens people on a hallucinogens spinoff. If only there were someone with the right hair.
While I'm partially joking, there is a deep internet rabbit hole on that stuff, and given we've evolved video games where you discover random things within the system to level up - and if we were in one (as some prominent tech figures suspect), we could probably find similar hints encoded in what we percieve as the biology of this one. It would be part of the design. To close the loop on the analogy, the logical substrate of a video game is in effect its own "biology," so to Super Mario, those mushrooms were as real as he was.
When you look at how as biological entities, we have evolved our own artificial game systems where we practice "leveling up" using found artifacts within the games, and it seems reasonable that this is self-similar to the rules and our experience of the world.
In that worldview, these plants, while of our same logical substrate, alter our perception of our physics and biology, and create a different experience of it where we percieve it without the same rules, and these are the clues within our logical layer that there is an encompassing set of rules to be discovered. Literally everything is a clue.
The shamanistic rituals aren't there to make us believe in spirits, they are wisely and sufficiently ridiculous to make the leveled up experience seem somehow sufficiently un-real and dismissable so that we can take from it and re-engage constructively on this level after acquiring knowledge of what's beyond.
One of the things I've always found interesting is that the idea of spirits, of being haunted by ghosts, etc. are likely just metaphors for psychological trauma, and rituals are just treatments for resolving these traumas or obtaining closure
I would love to hear what you all think about addiction, or at least a lack of addiction. I’ve always seemed to have a very low pain tolerance, and over the counter meds just don’t do much for me. On a few occasions I’ve been given stronger drugs like oxytocin and codeine — and the first thing people say is to watch out for their addictive properties. I…don’t seem to crave them, or anything else for that matter. Don’t get me wrong, I crave pain relief after having surgery. But once my wounds are healed, I can have a few pills sitting in my cabinet for months.
It’s the same thing with alcohol, weed, and Adderall. I enjoy their effects, but I’ve never felt that kind of magnetic pull other people seem to fear. I suppose the closest I’ve experienced to addiction is in dark chocolate. I suspect I have a magnesium deficiency that chocolate seems to sate every single time. Could it be that addiction is also a chronic deficiency in other physical needs?
I am a counselor who works with a lot of people suffering from chronic substance/behavior misuse (i.e. addiction).
check out the work of Dr Gabor Maté.
addiction is much less an intrinsic property of a substance and has much more to do with a combination of personal factors like upbringing, ACEs (adverse/traumatic childhood events), modeling, and some genetics.
it is not uncommon at all for someone to try an “addictive” substance like, say, cocaine, and never feel a pull to ever take it again.
Do you have insights/opinions on the difference between physical and psychological addictions? Everything I’ve read draws a distinction between the two, though not any hard-and-fast rules.
I’m especially curious about your take on things like nicotine or caffeine, which are generally considered to have more physically-addictive properties, whereas cocaine in my readings lies more in the mentally-addictive space (strong sense of motivation and empowerment and maybe invulnerability) up to a certain point.
Anything from shopping to SCUBA to hoarding can be psychologically addictive, so it seems like a much broader range of activities that is more affected by personal factors, whereas a physical addition is a craving/habit of the body. But I have no personal experience of viewing these in lots of people or from a trained counselor’s perspective.
The line you describe is quite blurred. A person without the "causes and conditions" for addictive behaviors can take a substance that is highly physically addictive, like nicotine, and still never have an urge to use it again. Most people know quite a few folks who have tried cigarettes once and only once.
An addictive pattern originates as a survival resource - it starts out as a helpful coping mechanism: "X makes me feel better, helps me to get through life". It doesn't matter what it is - heroin, shopping, gambling, nicotine, etc.
When someone starts taking the steps in their lives to learn new behaviors and break this cycle, the physically addictive properties of a substance are definitely relevant and need to be taken into consideration (consider things like alcohol or benzodiazepines which can have lethal withdrawal symptoms, depending on intensity / history of use, and will thus require medical support).
Otherwise, the underlying treatment model will be identical.
Also, consider that psychological symptoms can and will manifest as physical symptoms, and vice versa. I've witnessed incredible physical withdrawal symptoms as a result of unwinding "psychologically" addictive patterns like gambling or sex (night sweating, panic attacks, insomnia, GI issues, to name a few).
This review is much like Pollan's own writing, loose with the facts and wild with conjecture and speculation.
> so perhaps it is little wonder that the permanently sozzled intellectuals of the Middle Ages were prone to magical thinking.
What? Drinking alcohol adulterated water remained a common practice until the late 1800s. And we don't have reason to believe people were hammered all the time. Generally drink was lower in alcohol content then and it was usually cut with water.
> It’s unclear from the book (and from my subsequent Google searches) whether the spider was given the arachnid equivalent of a single cappuccino or a more Balzacian dose, which makes the comparison with other drugs less helpful, but Pollan’s point is that caffeine changes us more than we realise.
Is there even an equivalent? Spiders barely have what we consider a brain. I'm not sure much other than cellular science is translatable from spiders to humans.
> societies tend to ban those plants that appear to pose a threat to the social order.
That seems pretty suspect. Western societies after all have tolerated alcohol, probably one of the most destabilizing drugs there is, for centuries. It seems to me, they ban what is unfamiliar or rather, they ban anything that hasn't reached large usage among the power class of that society.
> > societies tend to ban those plants that appear to pose a threat to the social order.
> That seems pretty suspect. Western societies after all have tolerated alcohol, probably one of the most destabilizing drugs there is, for centuries. It seems to me, they ban what is unfamiliar or rather, they ban anything that hasn't reached large usage among the power class of that society.
Enforcement of anti-drug laws falls pretty heavily on the lower classes of society, particularly minorities. The ruling classes can pretty much get away with doing whatever drugs they want, rarely with any serious legal repercussions.
Psychedelics and cannabis were very strongly associated with the counterculture, religious and sex cults, social justice and antiwar movements, and with dropping out of the mainstream culture in the 1960's and 70's. This, along with wide-eyed sensational reporting of drug-related tragedies caused a full-blown moral panic that led to their being banned.
Alcohol never had a history of use that was even remotely close to this and it was widely used among all classes in society (including the ruling class). It too was banned in the US in the early part of the 20th Century until Prohibition was recognized to be much worse than allowing alcohol to be legal.
> Alcohol never had a history of use that was even remotely close to this
Are you kidding? People used to get drunk and riot all the time in major American and European cities. Have you ever read about the gin craze?
What is banned is certainly affected by the sensationalistic stories and the perceived scariness of it. But IMO the actual result of what does get banned has more to do with the cultural status quo, in group power and out group xenophobia.
The repeal of alcohol prohabition is good evidence of this. Alcohol was traditionally accepted in Western culture for one. It's use was widespread and sometimes even seen as a "right of a
passage" among the enfranchised class. America tolerated all kinds of other policy which lead to violence before, during and since prohibition. What got it repealed was that FDR and a lot of other politicians liked to drink. A lot of their voters liked to drink. They saw it as American to drink. They came from an alcohol tradition. Tobacco and caffeine are both intertwined with American middle and upper class identity, especially in the mid 20th century when these bans are really coming down. And of course, they weren't banned.
Psychedelics may have been used by in-group white kids but they were banned before their use could become wide enough to integrate them to the culture. Native support didn't matter because they are such a tiny population and so thuroughly locked out of power.
I tried salvia divinorum a few times, and the biggest insight I got from it was that the human brain is a machine, and is designed to do a specific thing, but if you throw a bunch of chemicals into it you can convert it into a machine for doing other random things like generate visual garbage and noise. I felt like my working memory had been reduced to only persisting for a half second, and my thoughts were reflected back onto themselves, making me get stuck in a moment in time and making it impossible to hold onto a train of thought, and my visual field was looped back on itself like when you point a camera at its own screen. I didn’t find the experience pleasurable, really.
From what I’ve read, the dissociative effects are much greater from smoking it than from the sublingual route. A minority of people enjoy dissociative effects, so your report makes sense.
I’m curious about what makes certain people enjoy dissociatives, since most people find them very uncomfortable.
Sublingual can be just as dissociative - perhaps even more - than smoking. Sublingual can give a much longer experience, and so there's a lot more time spent in that space (30-45+ minutes compared to 5-10).
What makes you say that most people find dissociatives uncomfortable?
Consider ketamine - a powerful dissociative that has widespread recreational use.
When used in a therapeutic, safe setting, the dissociative properties of medicines like salvia, ketamine, iboga, and 5-MeO-DMT are used to facilitate profound personal healing and transformation. These experiences are not necessarily pleasant, and that's also not the point. I'm most familiar with usage in this context, where the aspect of "enjoyment" is essentially orthogonal to the reason for consumption.
In fact, consciously exploring any discomfort that arises is what can facilitate efficacy.
> What makes you say that most people find dissociatives uncomfortable?
Anecdotal evidence from people who have tried them, as well as reading lots of experience reports. It’s hard to discern from all of that who/how many were taking them therapeutically vs recreationally. Your grain of salt is quite justified.
27 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 64.6 ms ] threadThe incredible Amazonian expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes made this Harvard University researcher a legend of ethnobotany, and brought us a wealth of knowledge about Indigenous culture and plant medicine use.
https://kahpi.net/richard-evans-schultes-amazon-shaman/
I think I might finally have the motivation to read his earlier book How to Change Your Mind
How does an animal stumble on the existence of geometry? Impaired sensory input creates feedback loops that yield periodic patterns. How does it begin apprehend the scope of something greater than its senses? Impairing those senses and seeing the edges. How do ancient people hear supposedly divine messages? Inhaling smoke from burning plants that contain substances that cause said impairment, like if a common regional bush that contained these substances caught fire, on a mountain somewhere, just randomly. If the knowledge from this tree that contained this chemical were forbidden, how would you preserve it? Rituals, symbols, allegories, etc. Who would forbid it and why?
Bonkers fun! I should pitch the Ancient Aliens people on a hallucinogens spinoff. If only there were someone with the right hair.
While I'm partially joking, there is a deep internet rabbit hole on that stuff, and given we've evolved video games where you discover random things within the system to level up - and if we were in one (as some prominent tech figures suspect), we could probably find similar hints encoded in what we percieve as the biology of this one. It would be part of the design. To close the loop on the analogy, the logical substrate of a video game is in effect its own "biology," so to Super Mario, those mushrooms were as real as he was.
When you look at how as biological entities, we have evolved our own artificial game systems where we practice "leveling up" using found artifacts within the games, and it seems reasonable that this is self-similar to the rules and our experience of the world.
In that worldview, these plants, while of our same logical substrate, alter our perception of our physics and biology, and create a different experience of it where we percieve it without the same rules, and these are the clues within our logical layer that there is an encompassing set of rules to be discovered. Literally everything is a clue.
The shamanistic rituals aren't there to make us believe in spirits, they are wisely and sufficiently ridiculous to make the leveled up experience seem somehow sufficiently un-real and dismissable so that we can take from it and re-engage constructively on this level after acquiring knowledge of what's beyond.
Who wants to be on the show? :)
It’s the same thing with alcohol, weed, and Adderall. I enjoy their effects, but I’ve never felt that kind of magnetic pull other people seem to fear. I suppose the closest I’ve experienced to addiction is in dark chocolate. I suspect I have a magnesium deficiency that chocolate seems to sate every single time. Could it be that addiction is also a chronic deficiency in other physical needs?
check out the work of Dr Gabor Maté.
addiction is much less an intrinsic property of a substance and has much more to do with a combination of personal factors like upbringing, ACEs (adverse/traumatic childhood events), modeling, and some genetics.
it is not uncommon at all for someone to try an “addictive” substance like, say, cocaine, and never feel a pull to ever take it again.
I’m especially curious about your take on things like nicotine or caffeine, which are generally considered to have more physically-addictive properties, whereas cocaine in my readings lies more in the mentally-addictive space (strong sense of motivation and empowerment and maybe invulnerability) up to a certain point.
Anything from shopping to SCUBA to hoarding can be psychologically addictive, so it seems like a much broader range of activities that is more affected by personal factors, whereas a physical addition is a craving/habit of the body. But I have no personal experience of viewing these in lots of people or from a trained counselor’s perspective.
An addictive pattern originates as a survival resource - it starts out as a helpful coping mechanism: "X makes me feel better, helps me to get through life". It doesn't matter what it is - heroin, shopping, gambling, nicotine, etc.
When someone starts taking the steps in their lives to learn new behaviors and break this cycle, the physically addictive properties of a substance are definitely relevant and need to be taken into consideration (consider things like alcohol or benzodiazepines which can have lethal withdrawal symptoms, depending on intensity / history of use, and will thus require medical support).
Otherwise, the underlying treatment model will be identical.
Also, consider that psychological symptoms can and will manifest as physical symptoms, and vice versa. I've witnessed incredible physical withdrawal symptoms as a result of unwinding "psychologically" addictive patterns like gambling or sex (night sweating, panic attacks, insomnia, GI issues, to name a few).
> so perhaps it is little wonder that the permanently sozzled intellectuals of the Middle Ages were prone to magical thinking.
What? Drinking alcohol adulterated water remained a common practice until the late 1800s. And we don't have reason to believe people were hammered all the time. Generally drink was lower in alcohol content then and it was usually cut with water.
> It’s unclear from the book (and from my subsequent Google searches) whether the spider was given the arachnid equivalent of a single cappuccino or a more Balzacian dose, which makes the comparison with other drugs less helpful, but Pollan’s point is that caffeine changes us more than we realise.
Is there even an equivalent? Spiders barely have what we consider a brain. I'm not sure much other than cellular science is translatable from spiders to humans.
> societies tend to ban those plants that appear to pose a threat to the social order.
That seems pretty suspect. Western societies after all have tolerated alcohol, probably one of the most destabilizing drugs there is, for centuries. It seems to me, they ban what is unfamiliar or rather, they ban anything that hasn't reached large usage among the power class of that society.
> That seems pretty suspect. Western societies after all have tolerated alcohol, probably one of the most destabilizing drugs there is, for centuries. It seems to me, they ban what is unfamiliar or rather, they ban anything that hasn't reached large usage among the power class of that society.
Enforcement of anti-drug laws falls pretty heavily on the lower classes of society, particularly minorities. The ruling classes can pretty much get away with doing whatever drugs they want, rarely with any serious legal repercussions.
Psychedelics and cannabis were very strongly associated with the counterculture, religious and sex cults, social justice and antiwar movements, and with dropping out of the mainstream culture in the 1960's and 70's. This, along with wide-eyed sensational reporting of drug-related tragedies caused a full-blown moral panic that led to their being banned.
Alcohol never had a history of use that was even remotely close to this and it was widely used among all classes in society (including the ruling class). It too was banned in the US in the early part of the 20th Century until Prohibition was recognized to be much worse than allowing alcohol to be legal.
Are you kidding? People used to get drunk and riot all the time in major American and European cities. Have you ever read about the gin craze?
What is banned is certainly affected by the sensationalistic stories and the perceived scariness of it. But IMO the actual result of what does get banned has more to do with the cultural status quo, in group power and out group xenophobia.
The repeal of alcohol prohabition is good evidence of this. Alcohol was traditionally accepted in Western culture for one. It's use was widespread and sometimes even seen as a "right of a passage" among the enfranchised class. America tolerated all kinds of other policy which lead to violence before, during and since prohibition. What got it repealed was that FDR and a lot of other politicians liked to drink. A lot of their voters liked to drink. They saw it as American to drink. They came from an alcohol tradition. Tobacco and caffeine are both intertwined with American middle and upper class identity, especially in the mid 20th century when these bans are really coming down. And of course, they weren't banned.
Psychedelics may have been used by in-group white kids but they were banned before their use could become wide enough to integrate them to the culture. Native support didn't matter because they are such a tiny population and so thuroughly locked out of power.
your experience sounds like that which can happen when salvia divinorum is smoked.
the traditional method of consumption by the Mazatec people (who have used this plant medicine in ritual for thousands of years) is sublingual.
creates an incredibly different effect than smoking it. tends to be much more pleasant and easier to integrate.
I do know several folks who quite enjoy smoking it. They are in the minority, however.
I’m curious about what makes certain people enjoy dissociatives, since most people find them very uncomfortable.
Sublingual can be just as dissociative - perhaps even more - than smoking. Sublingual can give a much longer experience, and so there's a lot more time spent in that space (30-45+ minutes compared to 5-10).
What makes you say that most people find dissociatives uncomfortable?
Consider ketamine - a powerful dissociative that has widespread recreational use.
When used in a therapeutic, safe setting, the dissociative properties of medicines like salvia, ketamine, iboga, and 5-MeO-DMT are used to facilitate profound personal healing and transformation. These experiences are not necessarily pleasant, and that's also not the point. I'm most familiar with usage in this context, where the aspect of "enjoyment" is essentially orthogonal to the reason for consumption.
In fact, consciously exploring any discomfort that arises is what can facilitate efficacy.
Anecdotal evidence from people who have tried them, as well as reading lots of experience reports. It’s hard to discern from all of that who/how many were taking them therapeutically vs recreationally. Your grain of salt is quite justified.