Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  She had come into the world by an unexpected Caesarean section and her mother had died during the delivery. And for fifty years she had lived in the guilt of having had her life given her at the cost of her mother's life. She had been in therapy with her family physician for about three years, largely addressing this problem, and apparently what she needed was the acknowledgment that it was all right to be alive. I didn't hear from her for a couple of months.

  When she did call, she volunteered that she still felt very much at peace, and had discontinued her therapy.

  In most of my own early experimental trials, I concentrated on the area of 80 to 100

  milligrams, and I used the word, "window," in my notes to describe the effects. It enabled me to see out, and to see my own insides, without distortion or reservations.

  Helen and I would occasionally take a 6:00 PM Friday to 4:00 PM Sunday trip with our friends -

  George and Ruth Close, whom we had known from the old Cal Hall days - on a special train out of Oakland called the Reno Fun Train. As the train proceeded eastwards across the Sierras, the mass of people would get increasingly noisy, with much food and drink, and even dancing in a music car. (After some thirty hours in the gambling casinos, the return trip was considerably more subdued.) Helen was basically uncomfortable with drugs, but perfectly at ease with an occasional drink; the Closes were, at that time, naive about any altered states except those induced by alcohol. On one of our trips, during our private foursome dinner with the cracked crab and avocado dip in the noisy car, I asked them if they would be offended if I filled my glass with quinine-water and the contents of a small vial, rather than with a martini. Why? An experiment, I said. Okay, they said, why not!

  It worked. It seemed that my gradual intoxication locked into theirs very smoothly. They forgot that I was using a chemical rather than vodka. So, for a while, I referred to MDMA as my low-calorie martini.

  Not long after that, I met and became very close to a likeable couple of professional researchers and teachers from Germany, Ursula and Adolph Biehls, who were studying for a year with Terry Major. Dolph, as he called himself, had taken a modest dosage of LSD one day and his experience had been extraordinarily complex, difficult and frightening. He continued for several weeks having problems with reintegration.

  I suggested, after considerable thought, that - although a new psychedelic experience would certainly not be appropriate - MDMA might be of some help to him. It was not a psychedelic, I emphasized, and explained the "window" concept, and why I thought he could perhaps use it to repair himself.

  I shared the experience with the two of them. It was a memorable day. There was verbal honesty without reserve, and the experiment led to an intimate friendship which would last between the three of us for several years. Dolph's LSD trauma was resolved in those few hours, and he emerged, in his own words, newborn. Another hint of snake-oil. MDMA, it was beginning to be apparent, could be all things to all people.

  There is another part of the MDMA story which should be told, and it concerns a kind, elderly psychologist who was everyone's idea of what a grandfather should be, both in looks and demeanor. He listened intently, laughed heartily and often, and - as Alice says - gave you the kind of hug you wanted to stay in forever.

  Adam had his practice in Oakland, on the second floor of a house which had been converted into office spaces. For the most part, his therapy was of the usual fifty-minute variety, but a small part of his practice followed quite another path, and was kept secret from all but his closest friends - and those with whom he chose to do his special work - until his death. It is still kept secret by those who knew and loved him, and will undoubtedly remain so.

  This quiet practice involved the use of psychoactive materials which would allow the client to step around his psychological barriers and address himself and his unconscious directly. The use of such drugs followed a technique which he had evolved over a couple of decades.

  Adam would go to the house of the client for these sessions. He always arranged ahead of time that the person taking the journey would have available family photographs which could be used to stimulate associations and prod open memories of childhood. He also told his client to frame for himself, before the day of the session, questions to which he wanted answers. After the drug had been given, Adam - not taking anything himself - would sit nearby to give assurance and a comforting touch of the hand, if needed, or to help untangle any knot or problem that might arise during the experience. The hard work was up to the client, and the answers to questions had to come from within the client's own psyche.

  Adam used a range of materials, from the relatively gentle MDA, to LSD or ibogaine, which he used for an all-out assault on psychological resistance. His sources of drugs were seemingly impeccable, usually reputable chemical supply houses, but it was in his nature to verify everything, and he would often call upon me to inspect a new material for final word as to identity and purity.

  In 1977, age was sneaking up on Adam and he was allowing his patient load to dwindle by attrition. I knew that he was getting ready to gather in his shingle and let the lease lapse on his Oakland office. One day, he asked me to drop by to see if I wanted to accept some of the unusual mementos which he had acquired over the years. There were bits of bark from here, and strange powders from there. He had small twigs and roots of Iboga, and discovery samples of the first collections of Yaje from South America. I spent a couple of hours with him and gratefully accepted his botanical museum.

  I had decided, on this occasion, to bring with me a small bottle of my "low-calorie martini,"

  MDMA hydrochloride, to tempt him to try something new. Knowing his fondness for MDA, I assured him it had some of the virtues of MDA, without the "stoning" properties, and it had something extra, a special magic, which just might catch his attention. He told me that he might or might not try it, but that if he did, he would let me know what he thought of it.

  He phoned me a few days later to tell me that he had abandoned his plans for a quiet retirement. I know none of the details of the increasingly complex network which he proceeded to develop over the following decade/ but I do know that he traveled across the country/

  introducing MDMA to other therapists and teaching them how to use it in their therapy. They all had to begin, of course, by learning its effects in themselves. Adam believed (as do I) that no therapist has the right to give a psychoactive drug to another person unless and until he is thoroughly familiar with its effects on his own body and mind.

  Many of the psychologists and psychiatrists whom Adam instructed developed small groups or enclaves of professionals who had been similarly taught, and the information and techniques he had introduced spread widely and, in time, internationally.

  It is impossible to ever know the true breadth of therapeutic MDMA usage achieved by Adam during the remaining years of his life, but at his memorial service, I asked an old friend of his whether she had a guess as to the number of people Adam had introduced to this incredible tool, either directly or indirectly. She was silent for a moment, then said, "Well/ I've thought about that, and I think probably somewhere around four thousand, give or take a few."

  It has proven to be such a valuable psychotherapeutic adjunct/1 truly believe it will persevere in therapeutic use for a long time to come/ despite the structuring of the law that has come about in many countries to prohibit its use and discourage its study.

  As one psychiatrist put it/ "MDMA is penicillin for the soul/ and you don't give up penicillin/

  once you've seen what it can do."

  CHAPTER 13. TIME-STOP

  I realize that/ for many people/ pot - marijuana - is of value primarily as a drug that relieves stress and smooths out tensions. In general/1 have regarded pot as a disappointment and a waste of time. It has, for me, really only two rewards: food tastes exceptionally good under its influence, and time slows to an extent that makes it possible to play clock-stopping games.

  Once, I chose to u
se it just as a de-stressor, after a somewhat brittle experiment with a new drug combination, and found myself - not by choice - in a time-stopping experience that was truly frightening.

  This particular day in April, sometime in the 1970's, Theo was away at college and Helen was visiting a relative for a few days, so I had the house to myself. At that time I was occasionally using either of two interesting experimental procedures. One of these, which I called "priming," was the taking of an active drug at a certain interval of time following an inactive one. If the observed effects of the "active" drug (the primed drug) are different due to the presence of the inactive drug (the priming drug) then some understanding of the process of potentiation might be gotten. The other of these, which I called "piggybacking," involved the taking of an active drug during the drop-off phase of another, different, active drug. The use of such a "false supplement" can reveal differences of qualitative action that can help define both drugs more accurately.

  On this occasion, the first (and active) drug was MDOH, and the piggyback drug was MDA. I had always had a feeling in the back of my mind that these two materials might somehow merge their identities in the course of being metabolized in the body; they have very similar actions and very similar structures. They differ only by the presence of an oxygen atom, and the body is quite capable of adding (or removing) an oxygen atom in the normal process of biotransformation.

  So, at 2:00 PM, I had taken 100 milligrams.of MDOH, and had recorded a typical chronology and response to it. Later in the afternoon, as the effects were receding - at 4:30 PM, to be exact -1 took a similar dose of MDA. Would they see each other? Would the MDA be similar enough to the MDOH to act as a supplement, and rekindle the now-waning effects of the MDOH? Or would there be some refractoriness from the first material which would make the MDA relatively ineffective? Or, for that matter, might there be an exacerbation of effects that might indicate some sort of synergy?

  The effects were largely additive. At the usual awareness time of MDA - about a half-hour -1

  noted a familiar skin-crawling, and a quiet entry into a pretty stoned state. The expected spectrum of physical annoyances common to both drugs was there, the teeth clenching and irregularities of the motor muscles of the eyes. It was quite easy to trigger nystagmus. My handwriting was going downhill, and my motor coordination on the piano was compromised.

  Another hour, and I found that there was a little time-slowing and I could play some visual games; I could get the shapes created by light and shadow from the setting sun (shining through tree leaves) to take on human forms.

  By 7:00 PM, I was back down to a plus-one and at 8:00 PM, I was essentially baseline, with a somewhat sore jaw from the teeth clenching, and a weary psyche from the rest of the day's activities. That is why it was one of those rare times when I chose to use a little marijuana, to escape the stress. I smoked a 200 milligram sample of a gift material which had been sitting around, unused, for a couple of years. This was at 8:15 PM, and what followed was simply incredible.

  By 8:28 PM (thirteen minutes had elapsed), I was aware of the first indications of marijuana effect, which was, for me, about the expected time. This first alert was followed by a sequence of waves of sensation, each wave bringing with it an increased slowing of time. It was uncanny, how these seemed to be evenly and regularly spaced, but as I looked at the clock's second hand, I noted that the waves must have been getting closer and closer together.

  Actually, this impression was due to the fact that the second hand was moving ever more slowly, rather than that the waves were different in their spacing.

  My note, written at 8:31 PM, stated that there was considerable subjective time passage, out of proportion to the clock's activity, but that the music on the radio had no pitch distortion at all.

  The next entry was made a couple of weeks later, at 8:35 PM, and I had just felt another wave of slowing hit me. And, just as the second-hand finally made it all the way around the clock face to 8:36 PM, there was yet another wave.

  I was getting scared. What was the status of my body? I tried to take my pulse, which is a totally ridiculous thing to do, when it takes forever to go from one heartbeat to another. You lose track of one thump-pa by the time you think that another thump-pa has just taken place.

  And the actual thump-pa itself is, of course, spread out across the countryside and is awfully difficult to identify. Is it the thoo-or is it the ump-or is it the -pa that counts? I noticed that there were three sounds that occurred during the time that the slow second-hand moved from one mark to another, so maybe my pulse was 180. Maybe not. There was no way for me to find out.

  It was now 8:38 PM and I knew intellectually that only twenty-five minutes had elapsed since I felt the first effects. Twenty-five days seemed a better estimate. I got up and went to the piano and tried some of the Chopin First Nocturne. My fingers were somewhat sloppy, but the pitch was absolutely correct. I thought, if a second takes so long to pass, why doesn't the pitch, at so many vibrations per second, seem to be way down there, basso? Could it be that the sound receptors in my ear are also somehow slowed down, so that everything is right back up there in sync again? That makes no sense.

  I abandoned the piano and returned to the couch and clock. In spite of my having played for quite a while, it was now only 8:41 PM. I thought, I am so far above a plus-three, there are no valid numbers. I can't use the plus-four symbol, since that stands for something quite apart from a stoned psychedelic state, so let's call this a 3.7 plus. Try the pulse again. Now, there is nothing to be heard at all, so either the heart has stopped beating (is that what happens if time comes totally to a stop?) or the rumbly sounds are so diffuse, they cannot be identified.

  But, then, why should a piano sound be okay, but a heart sound be screwy? Should I call for help?

  By 8:53 PM, I had made my way through miles of house to the dining room where the phone was located, and dialed the number of my friend, George Close. It was with horror and dismay that I discovered the phone was dead. There was absolutely no sound on it. I let my gaze drift around the room, looking for sornething to quiet the rising panic. I wasn't certain just what I was looking for; something that would tell me which way to turn, what to do. I was forever captive in the house, and as it had taken me so long a time just to go from one room to the next, I knew that I could never get as far as the car, let alone drive it! What kind of extraordinary experience would it be, to drive a car with such extreme mis-estimating of time!

  I certainly didn't intend to find out.

  And then it happened. I was startled back into the moment by the sound of the phone ringing in my ear. The connection had just been completed, and the Close's phone was ringing.

  Forever went by, then there was a second ring. Forever again, then a third ring. Ruth answered and her voice sounded normal (so voices as well as music didn't observe the changed time rules).

  I spoke into the phone/ "I'm in a funny place, Ruth, and I'm a bit scared. Could George come out and make sure that I will be findable, if things progress much more?"

  I knew that made very little sense, but Ruth assured me that George was on his way, and I decided to stay on the phone and use her voice as an anchor in this strange storm.

  I had never before been involved in a conversation that lasted for a century.

  Now, my self-classification was at a 3.9 plus. I remember, at one point, asking Ruth to stay on the line while I went to the office for a piece of paper and a pen, and to note how long I was gone. I wanted to get a current estimate of how long something seemed to take, having her as the objective time-keeper. She said she would hold on and wait for my return. My plan was to start my internal subjective stop-watch and try to deduce just how much time it would take me to reach the office, pick up something, and return to the phone. Then I would get the real elapsed time from Ruth, and divide one into the other to get my "slowing factor."

  I put the receiver down on the table and headed in the direction of my office. There wil
l never be a way of reconstructing the myriad thoughts that went through my mind as I walked down the hall. One thought did stick in my mind, though. How can a person address, objectively, the subjective time-passing sense? How could I attend to an internal clock with some accuracy, so that I might give Ruth a really close guess as to just how long my round-trip really took me, subjectively? Estimating seconds by the one-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two process was no good, since apparently the flow-of-words clock appeared to be running at about the right rate; it was the elapsed-time clock that was slowed down.

  I reached the office, and for the life of me could not remember what it was I had intended to get. I looked around for something that I might be able to use to shed light on one clock or the other. Had I intended to type something? Calculate something? Read something? The world around me was colorful and moving, but - enjoyable as visual synthesis might be -1 didn't want to let it take over. I had to stay in verbal contact. Which reminded me that the phone was off the hook and Ruth was at the other end, waiting. I had completely forgotten her, and hoped that she had waited for me.

  I made it back, and she was still there.

  "Sorry to be so long. I got distracted."

  "How long do you think you were away?"

  "Twenty, thirty minutes?"

  "You were gone one minute, or a few seconds more than a minute."

  So the factor was about 20 to 1 between the clocks. I knew that there had been no more waves of slowing for quite a while now, and somehow I sensed that there was repair on the way. After some long and complex discussions on the phone about the essential nature of the universe, I heard George drive up, and I let Ruth go on to bed. George came through the front door in great good humor, checked my pulse (it was about 110) and in general found me to be in an okay physical place. I'm pretty sure - now - that my heart had been all right throughout the evening.