“Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition,” Edmund Burke wrote, “men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations – wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.” Mescaline, for those who don’t know – for drinkers, smokers, self-deniers, prohibitionists, the pious, and all straight-edge, clean-living types – is a naturally occurring psychedelic alkaloid, known for its powerful hallucinogenic effects and used for thousands of years by the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is derived from the peyote cactus and other members of the cactus family, was first synthesised in the laboratory in the early 20th century, and was made famous by Aldous Huxley’s thoughtful account of his experimentation with the drug in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Hunter S Thompson’s completely frenzied account of his experiences on “the fiendish cactus juice” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971).
Mike Jay is an eminent writer on mind-stilling and mind-expanding substances, having written numerous books, including what is by far the best study of laughing gas (The Atmosphere of Heaven), and just about the only book on the ancient ritual drink soma (The Blue Tide). Mescaline reads like the culmination of a lifetime’s wanderings in the very farthest outposts of scientific and medical history. It roams from speculation about the use of psychedelic snuff in the prehistoric Chavín culture of the northern Andes, to descriptions of the pre-conquest peyote rituals of the Nahua in Mexico and Comanche chief Quanah Parker’s promotion of the peyote religion, to a detailed account and analysis of Walter Benjamin’s drug habit, the CIA’s covert MK-Ultra drug-testing programme, and the recent popularity of ayahuasca ceremonies. Who knew that Frederick Madison Smith, grandson of Joseph Smith and the third Mormon prophet-president, was a peyote enthusiast?
Despite its breadth – because of its breadth – Jay’s is a highly nuanced account. His aim is to study the uses and effects of mescaline in its many and diverse historical and cultural contexts. Western modernity, he notes, has often focused on the nature of mescaline visions, ascribing them meanings variously “neurological, literary, occult, psychodynamic, aesthetic, spiritual”, while indigenous cultures have tended to regard the visions as of merely peripheral interest, compared to the life-enhancing importance of rituals and ceremonies. “The distinction,” he notes, “between western and indigenous understandings of mescaline maps closely, though not exactly, on to the distinction between pure mescaline, the product of the 20th-century laboratory, and its natural sources: two families of cactus, the peyote of Mexico and the San Pedro of the Andes.”
The book is by no means a user’s guide, but Jay clearly has some personal interest in the subject. “My uncle Peter … after reading The Doors of Perception … visited the office of Aldrich, the research chemical supplier, outside London and casually requested some … He was sold half a kilo, over a thousand doses, which kept the beatnik vanguard of Soho and the Sussex coasts supplied for some time.” The book ends with the author’s account of his own participation in an elaborate and mystical peyote ceremony, though his account of an earlier rough-and-ready experiment with some boiled cactus and cane sugar is perhaps rather more revealing, as well as off-putting: “Languorous muscle relaxation combined with tremors, restlessness and nausea; fizzing euphoria with the ominous sensation of a fast-rising fever; a thrumming vibration in the chest with a cold heaviness in the limbs.” The warm glow from a swift half after work or a stiff G&T this is not.
Undoubtedly the most famous description of the effects of taking mescaline is from The Doors of Perception, in which Huxley describes “Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!” Jay notes that Huxley had in fact been wearing jeans during the actual experiment and that it was only his wife Maria’s insistence that he should be rather “better dressed” for his readers that turned Huxley’s blue jeans into grey flannel. Drugs are OK. Words are absolutely fantastic.
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