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Файл:Ординатура / Хирургия / Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана / Книга_5227_Библиотеки_им_академика_М_И_Перельмана.pdf
TWICE-BORN
balanced between dispassionate observation and waking dream,
recalled the subjective reportage of the nineteenth century:
Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck,
a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the
bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm
salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible
image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my
head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and
closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A
huge, neon-lit cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets,
traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a
skull on a tray; stars in the clear sky.
14
Burroughs was drawn to memoirs of the criminal and drug underworlds of the past almost as keenly as to drugs themselves: You Can’t Win
(1926), the burglar and hobo Jack Black’s memoir of safe-cracking, vice,
prison and life on the road, was an enduring favourite, as was James Lee’s
memoir, The Underworld of the East. Burroughs praised Lee’s book in an
unpublished foreword as a narrative ‘conjured from the unpolluted air of
the nineteenth century’ before drugs became taboo, when their pleasures
could be celebrated frankly. He was fascinated by the details of Lee’s drug
reduction and withdrawal system, and his ‘wholesome regime of four
daily injections of morphine and cocaine in equal quantities, four pipes
of opium before retiring, and hashish throughout the day’.
Lee’s ‘happy and nostalgic book’ became a charter and a template
for Burroughs’s rediscovery of a polydrug regime from similarly eclectic
sources: medical expertise, street pharmacology and foreign travels.15
At the end of Junky, in Mexico City, he noted that ‘peyote is a new kick
in the States. It isn’t under the Harrison Act, and you can buy it from
herb dealers through the mail.’16 He sourced some from a local supplier,
examined it closely, peeled four heads and grated the pulp ‘until it
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looks like avocado salad’. He swallowed it down with difficulty,
vomited and waited for the effects. ‘Peyote high is something like a
Benzedrine high,’ he concluded. ‘You can’t sleep and your pupils are
dilated. Everything looks like a peyote plant.’
Benzedrine was an early addition to the street pharmacy, encountered through hitching all-night lifts with long-distance truck drivers.
In 1954, on the run from legal problems and the manslaughter of his
wife, Burroughs was inspired by Paul Bowles’s writings to visit Tangier,
where he included hashish in his daily repertoire. He became captivated
by the Assassin legend, which he twisted into a countercultural myth
of initiation into an underground drug culture, much as Théophile
Gautier had in his accounts of the Club des Hashischins. The Old Man
of the Mountain, Hassan-i-Sabbah, became for Burroughs a recurring
motif of resistance to authoritarian control. Where Jacques-Joseph
Moreau had dosed his subjects with the faux-Assassin blessing ‘This
will be deducted from your share in Paradise’, Burroughs identified
Hassan-i-Sabbah’s creed with the motto ‘Nothing is True. Everything is
Permitted.’
17
* * *
In February 1961, while the UN’s deliberations over the Single
Convention on Drugs were in progress, the most consequential selfexperimental programme of the era was launched on the suburban
fringes of Boston. Beside the fireplace in his rented home in Newton,
looking across the river to Harvard University, the research psychologist
Timothy Leary and his senior colleague Richard Alpert, assistant
professor in clinical psychology, each counted out five 2mg pink pills of
Indocybin, the synthetic compound psilocybin recently isolated from a
Mexican mushroom and brought to market by Sandoz Pharmaceuticals
of Basel, Switzerland.
The previous summer, Leary had made his first experiment with
psilocybin mushrooms in a villa overlooking a golf course in Cuernavaca,
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a moneyed resort an hour south of Mexico City. His luxury poolside
holiday devolved into a mind-shattering experience during which he
laughed and cried helplessly while being whisked through time and
space on a tour of palaces, temples, jungles and kaleidoscopic vortices.
After five hours he returned, exhausted and exhilarated, with a conviction that set the course for the rest of his life. On his return to Harvard,
he approached Alpert to join him in forming the Harvard Psilocybin
Project, which aimed to extend his self-experiment to a cohort of
faculty members and graduate students. Between them they proposed
to assemble a dossier of subjective reports that would, they hoped,
open up a new and exciting field of psychology.
Despite the eclipse of introspection during the Progressive Era and
the heyday of behaviourism, self-experimentation had not entirely
disappeared. The method retained a handful of stalwart champions
across the sciences, though they found themselves pushing against the
grain. One prominent example was the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, whose
father John Scott Haldane was a heroic scientist in the nineteenthcentury mould: in 1895 he had himself lowered into a well in which
five men had died from inhaling unidentified poison gas, and identified
the presence of hydrogen sulphide. J.B.S., in the course of a high-profile
career that ranged across genetics, mathematics and physiology, made
experimenting on himself a point of principle, and cheerfully admitted
to having on many occasions ‘lost consciousness from blows on the
head, from fever, anaesthetics, want of oxygen and other causes’.18 He
regarded animal subjects as ‘useful for rough experiments’ but distinctly
second-best when the aim of the research was to study human responses.
For Haldane, self-experiment was not merely the clear ethical choice
– in their own researches, scientists should be prepared to lead from the
front – but provided superior results. In 1927, in a celebrated essay
entitled ‘On Being One’s Own Rabbit’, he described a series of experiments in which he ‘wanted to find out what happened to a man when
one made him more acid or more alkaline’.19 He attempted to saturate
his blood with carbon dioxide by overbreathing, with a colleague on
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hand to prod him when he passed out; by eating 3 ounces of bicarbonate of soda; by drinking a pint of corrosive hydrochloric acid solution;
and by eating ammonium chloride. He pronounced himself ‘quite
satisfied to have reproduced in myself the type of shortness of breath
which occurs in the terminal stage of kidney disease and diabetes’.20 ‘It
might be thought that experiments such as I have described were
dangerous’, he concluded, but ‘This is not the case if they are done
with intelligence . . . Experiments in which one stakes one’s life on the
correctness of one’s biochemistry are far safer than those of an aeroplane designer who is prepared to fall a thousand feet if his aerodynamics are incorrect. They are also perhaps more likely to be of benefit
to humanity in general.’
21
Haldane’s practices were rational, courageous and hair-raising in
equal measure, and in part an assertion of the heroism of his father’s
generation against a bloodless twentieth-century scientific method. He
regularly volunteered for human trials by other scientists, including in
1949 with the pharmacology department of University College London,
where he attempted to complete cognitive tasks under the influence of
nitrous oxide in a project supervised by the young psychopharmacologist Hannah Steinberg. Steinberg went on to have a distinguished career
studying the actions of drugs which, following Haldane, she made a
point of testing on herself. Self-experiment, she wrote, informed her
insights into how much their effects could vary, depending on the
subject and their emotional state.22 Her method made her an outlier
among her colleagues, but her gender attracted rather less attention
than May Smith’s had a generation previously. In 1970 she became the
first professor of psychopharmacology at University College London.
It was within pharmacology, as in Steinberg’s case, that self-experiment
had remained most deeply rooted, particularly when new psychoactive
drugs were being synthesised and tested. The discovery of amphetamines,
the most significant family of psychoactive drugs to emerge in the early
twentieth century, illustrated its benefits. In June 1929, at the physiological department of UCLA, the US chemist Gordon Alles developed a
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novel compound from adrenaline, beta-phenyl-isopropylamine, which
he trialled on guinea pigs. He learned from his lab animals that it raised
blood pressure, but self-experiment told him far more than they ever
could. When injected with it by a colleague, he recorded ‘a feeling of wellbeing’ and became talkative; he invited his colleague home to dinner with
his wife, at which his conversation was unusually sparkling. Afterwards he
had a ‘rather sleepless night’ in which his ‘mind seemed to race from one
subject to another’.
23
Alles and his colleagues self-experimented with daily doses of the
compound and named it amphetamine. It increased their energy, excitement and ‘pep’, and in some cases their anxiety. Alles created further
compounds in the lab, and on 16 July 1930 he took 126mg of a variant
he had created by adding hydrogen atoms to the molecule. This produced
more marked visual effects: the room seemed ‘to be filled with curling
smoke’. ‘Cannot think in long chains,’ he scribbled; ‘thought skips rapidly
but seems quite clear.’ These changes were accompanied by a ‘generalised
feeling of well-being’, along with dilated pupils and grinding teeth.24 The
compound would become known as methylene-dioxyamphetamine or
MDA, a close cousin of MDMA (ecstasy).
Alles was granted a patent for amphetamine and took it to the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline and French (SKF), who in 1934
brought out Benzedrine, a volatile preparation of amphetamine in a
metal tube for spraying into the sinuses as a decongestant. It was an
instant commercial success. SKF were equally interested in its potential
as a mental performance enhancer, and embarked on a series of trials
with subjects ranging from fellow chemists to children with learning
disabilities. Advertisements in medical journals offered free samples of
Benzedrine sulphate pills to doctors, who reported that it could be
usefully prescribed for fatigue, depression and narcolepsy.
25
It was crucial, however, to demarcate this type of freewheeling
professional experiment from indiscriminate use by the public at large.
Among the early recipients of Benzedrine was William Sargant at
London’s Maudsley Hospital, an early and enthusiastic champion of
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psychiatric treatments such as insulin coma and electroshock therapy.
Sargant noted amphetamine’s early promise in the treatment of depressive patients, and proceeded to experiment on himself:
Though I have rarely taken drugs for experimental purposes, lest
they might bias my judgment, I did try one of these tablets one
Saturday afternoon, then I walked energetically around the
Zoological Gardens with a most delightful sense of confidence and
not in the least fatigued. Returning to the hospital, I worked hard all
that evening, still happy and vigorous. It suddenly occurred to me
that, unless this top-of-the-world feeling were due to some other
cause, Benzedrine should clearly help me to pass examinations.
26
Sure enough, Sargant passed his Diploma of Psychological Medicine on
amphetamines with flying colours, and an informal small-scale trial
with his Maudsley colleagues established that it ‘noticeably improved
the percentage of correct answers’. Sargant theorised that this was
connected with its virtues as an anti-depressant: it did not necessarily
boost intelligence, merely confidence. A few years later, however, he was
appalled to discover that Benzedrine was being bought from pharmacies
‘in the form of tablets such as “Drinamyl” or “Purple Hearts”, which
psychopaths, drug addicts and simple delinquents used as a source of
cheap “kicks”’. Although ‘I had myself tested its effects beforehand and
found that it agreed with my particular constitution’, he lobbied vigorously for it to be limited to medical prescription.27 The lines between
research and recreation, science and advocacy, professional and personal
use were more clearly drawn in the twentieth century than in Sigmund
Freud’s day, as Leary and Alpert would quickly discover.
* * *
On 31 January 1960, the author, poet and classicist Robert Graves
joined Gordon Wasson and his wife, Valentina, in their Manhattan
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apartment overlooking the East River for an experiment with ‘magic
mushrooms’. Wasson, a senior public relations man with the investment
bankers J.P. Morgan, had caused a sensation in 1957 when his article
‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’ was splashed across eight vividly illustrated pages of the May 1957 issue of Life magazine, in which Wasson
described his participation in sacred mushroom rites in the remote
mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. It was Graves who had originally alerted
Wasson to the story, on the basis of a paper by the Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, written in 1939, which identified the
sacred plant described in Aztec codices as teonanácatl, ‘flesh of the gods’,
as a hallucinogenic fungus.28 Schultes’s work had aroused little interest
outside his specialist discipline at the time, but by the mid-1950s it was
of huge significance to enthusiasts such as Wasson, who had developed
an amateur but tenacious and well-funded fascination with the sacred
and mind-altering role of mushrooms in prehistory.
Wasson offered Graves the mushrooms ‘in crystalline form’, the
Indocybin that the Sandoz Pharmaceuticals chemist and discoverer of
LSD, Albert Hofmann, had isolated in 1958 from Wasson’s Mexican
mushroom specimens, and with which Leary and Alpert would make
their first formal experiment the following year. Graves was unsure of
what to expect and feared he would be visited by ‘hideous demons and
nameless horrors’, but as the pink pills took effect he achieved an effortless transcendence:
My closest experience to this had been in early childhood when,
after waiting endlessly in the cold, dark hall, my sisters and I saw
the drawing-room door suddenly flung open and there blazed the
Christmas tree: all its candles lighted, its branches glistening with
many-coloured tinsel.
29
Wasson played his tape recording of Maria Sabina, the Mazatec
curandera who had guided him through his first mushroom encounter,
invoking Christ in the form of Tlaloc, the pre-Hispanic deity of rain
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and fertility. For Graves, ‘it might have been the Goddess Aphrodite
addressing her forward son Eros’. He was entranced, and ‘the songnotes became intricate links of a round golden chain that coiled and
looped in serpentine fashion among jade-green bushes’. After several
hours the trance and the visions faded, and as the company ate cold
turkey sandwiches in the kitchen Graves realised that ‘a curious bond
of affection had been established between us: so strong that I felt
nothing could ever break it’. He parted the next morning, ‘profoundly
refreshed and (in Wordsworth’s phrase) trailing clouds of glory’.
30
Reflecting on the experience, Graves concluded that it had been
more than a personal transformation; it had changed the meaning of
‘drugs’ entirely:
The word ‘drug’, originally applied to all ingredients used in chem-
istry, pharmacy, dyeing and so on, has acquired a particular conno-
tation in English, which cannot apply to psilocybin: ‘to drug’ is to
stupefy, rather than to quicken the senses . . . This particular virtue
of psilocybin, the power to enhance personal reality, turns ‘Know
Thyself’ into a practical precept.
31
In the pivotal years of the early 1960s, many things changed at once.
At the moment when the Progressive-Era notion of ‘drugs’ was enshrined
in international law, a new class of drugs emerged under the name
‘psychedelics’, a coinage that aimed to escape and overwrite the negatives of ‘drugs’ with positive associations that aligned it with the latest
iteration of modernity. Graves was among the first wave of prominent
scientists, writers and intellectuals who had been repelled by the idea of
‘drugs’ as they had previously conceived them, but became outspoken
and passionate advocates for what became known as ‘the psychedelic
experience’. This was, in turn, part of a broader shift in which the behavioural and normative psychology that underpinned the Progressive Era’s
rejection of drugs was challenged by a rediscovery of mystical experience
and, in particular, the writings of William James and the capacious view
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of mental life he had advocated. All these shifts combined to create new
possibilities for drug-induced states of consciousness and even, through
its reframing by influential figures such as Wasson and Graves, to change
the experience itself.
The curious fact that drug effects could be transformed by their social
context had recently been examined by the sociologist Howard Becker in
his 1953 paper ‘Becoming a Marijuana User’. Becker had studied jazz
musicians in New York, among whom cannabis-smoking was common;
this was, he concluded, not because its members were deviants or criminals, but because they enjoyed its effects in ways that were not available to
the straight majority. ‘Marihuana use’, he wrote, ‘is a function of the individual’s conception of marihuana and the uses to which it can be put.’
Most Americans were not acquainted with cannabis users, and the experience of getting high would be strange, alienating and disturbing for them;
but within a subculture that shared and celebrated ‘concrete referents of
the term “high”’, a novice could quickly be initiated into recognising its
pleasures. ‘The new concepts’, Becker argued, ‘make it possible for him to
locate these symptoms among his own sensations’ and to associate them
with enjoyable effects. Light-headedness and confusion, rather than being
perceived as symptoms of illness, would become cues for giggling and
verbal flights of fancy, and anxiety or paranoia could be shared in a spirit
of camaraderie and amusement.
32
Becker’s insights were equally applicable to the process by which
mind-altering drugs had found their niches in the nineteenth century,
and they were timely at a moment when psychiatry’s biomedical turn
was promoting the assumption that their effects were constructed
entirely in the brain. His theory was supremely applicable to psychedelics, as the ideas introduced by Graves and the Wassons demonstrated.
In the years after psilocybin had been isolated from the Mexican mushroom and identified as a psychedelic, it gradually became clear that
psilocybin-containing fungi were indigenous across Europe and the
United States. There was no documented cultural or religious tradition
for their use, but there were many examples of accidental ingestion,
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recorded over the years by doctors, mycologists and toxicologists. None
of these had been conceived as a mystical or spiritual experience. Their
subjects, on noticing the early onset of psilocybin’s effects – dizziness,
gastric disturbance, odd and intrusive thoughts – had typically leapt to
the conclusion that they had inadvertently eaten poisonous fungi and
were undergoing a toxic crisis, perhaps a fatal one.33 Hallucinatory
effects and visual distortions were experienced as delirium or fever, and
often rendered more disturbing by attendant physicians applying emergency medicine such as emetics or stomach pumps.
All this changed with Wasson’s announcement that he had discovered an indigenous mushroom ceremony believed by many Western
experts to be long extinct. Mushroom intoxication was reconceived as
a sacred experience with a deep history that long pre-dated Christianity,
and Albert Hofmann’s isolation of a new psychedelic compound from
the Wassons’ specimens added the imprimatur of science to the allure
of ancient ritual. This was not how Maria Sabina conceived the mushrooms: she herself was a devout Catholic and regarded her ceremony
not as an act of worship but simply a healing intervention, ‘done with
the sole purpose of curing the sicknesses that our people suffer from’.34
Wasson, however, claimed it as the vestigial survival of a prehistoric
mushroom cult that he had long suspected was the source of the world’s
great religions. ‘Magic mushrooms’, as the editors of Life had christened them, became imbued with qualities that the term ‘drugs’ was
unable to encompass.
Wasson was a curious-minded amateur, but Robert Graves was an
eminent authority on ancient religions, and he elaborated their sacred
mushroom theories for a wide general readership. The first edition of
his popular exploration of classical myth and poetry, The White Goddess,
published in 1948, made no mention of mushrooms, but in the third
edition of 1960 they were everywhere:
a secret Dionysiac mushroom cult was borrowed from the native
Pelasgians by the Achaeans of Argos. Dionysius’ [sic] centaurs,
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