Psychedelic Chemistry has been a long standing favorite, a must for every clandestine chemist’s bookshelf for decades. It was first published in the seventies, with the most recent edition appearing in 1981. While a lot has transpired in psychoactive chemistry since then, with PIHKAL and TIHKAL taking notable preeminence among such books, Michael Valentine Smith’s Psychedelic Chemistry nevertheless towers over ... [ read more ]
The Yage Letters begins with the letters William Burroughs sends to Allen Ginsberg while Ayahuasca-touring in Central America and the Colombian outback in 1953, and concludes with the letters from Ginsberg who follows his friend’s steps in 1960 and takes on his own journey of visionary enlightment in Peru. What was thought to be an initiating and liberating journey turns ... [ read more ]
Peter Lee’s The Big Smoke presents the process of opium smoking, from planting seeds to smoking the prepared opium. Along the way, Lee offers a brief historical background ranging from the international opium trade of previous centuries to the current ban on harvesting and use. The book features copious black and white images to supplement the material. ... [ read more ]
After spending enough time identifying yourself as a member of the “psychedelic community” at large, you begin to take for granted the fact that the war on drugs is an awful monstrosity. You get used to the numbing barrage of horror stories that seem to pour through news outlets on a regular basis. You nod cynically and get ... [ read more ]
Benny Shanon’s The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience is one of the most compelling books on altered states I’ve read, up there with James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Huxley’s Doors of Perception (to which Shanon’s title alludes) and PIHKAL and TIHKAL by Ann and Alexander Shulgin. Unlike, say, the psychedelic performance artist Terence McKenna ... [ read more ]
In Eating the Flowers of Paradise, Kevin Rushby tells the story of an epic trip—not just a tale of a literal intoxication, but of an emotional and intellectual obsession. A decade following a job teaching English in the Yemeni city of San’a, where Rushby first enjoyed qat, he decides to return to Yemen by way of Ethiopia, where the drug ... [ read more ]
LSD: My Problem Child is a wonderful guided tour through the history of LSD and the very thoughts of Dr. Hofmann. The book covers the discovery of the compound, its use in early psychiatry, and its later use in the counter culture. He also presents a great deal of information about his early experiments on animals, himself, and his ... [ read more ]
In The Magic Land Of Peyote is a pioneering journey into the heart of the most iconic peyote-lovers and peyote-worshippers Indians of Mexico : the Huichols. Fernando Benitez is a leading Mexican anthropologist, author of the reference Los Indios de Mexico, and was one of the very first to experience the annual Huichol pilgrimage to the mountains of north-eastern ... [ read more ]
What happens when chaos theorist Ralph Abraham, morphogenetic fields theorist Rupert Sheldrake and entheoprovocateur Terence McKenna get together to talk shop? A surprisingly lucid trialogue of crosspollinating far-flung speculation on the nature of reality, consciousness, the imagination and human destiny.
Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (earlier published as Trialogues at the Edge of the West) is edited from transcripts of a ... [ read more ]
Cannabis is a very thorough text describing research on cannabis extracts as part of modern prescription medicine. The clinical trials involved are meticulously outlined for the reader. The material highlights how much work and analysis goes into complex pharmaceutical testing. Along with the research, Russo has included some aspects of marijuana history. There are a couple ... [ read more ]