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PHARMACOLOGY The long, strange trip of mescaline A chronicle tracing the drug's ancient roots and role in research grips Alison Abbott. Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic MIKEJAY Yale University Press (2019)
Pharmacologists gave mescaline a fair trial. In the early and midtwentieth century, it seemed more than plausible that the fashionable hallucinogen could be tamed into a therapeutic agent. After all, it had profound effects on the human body, and had been used for centuries in parts of the Americas as a gateway to ceremonial spiritual experience.
But this psychoactive alkaloid never found its clinical indication, as science writer Mike Jay explains in Mescaline, his anthropological and medical history. In the 1950s, the attention of biomedical researchers abruptly switched to a newly synthesized molecule with similar hallucinogenic properties but fewer physical side effects: lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. First synthesized by Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann in 1938, LSD went on to become a recreational drug of choice in the 1960s hippy era. And, like mescaline, it teased psychiatrists without delivering a cure.
ANCIENT HISTORY
Jay traces the chronology of mescaline use. The alkaloid is found in the fast-growing San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi) that towers above the mountainous desert scrub of the Andes, and the slow-growing, ground-hugging peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) native to Mexico and the southwestern United States. Archaeological evidence suggests that the use of these cacti in rites of long-vanished cultures goes back at least 5,000 years.
Europeans first came across peyote after Spain conquered Mexico in the early sixteenth century. (It is mentioned, for instance, in a mammoth study, The General History of the Things of New Spain, begun by scholar and friar Bernardino de Sahagún in 1529.) Attempts, largely by missionaries, to suppress its use were...