The average thrill seeker, if there is such a type, may still be high on LSD. But to serious researchers, it has become as old hat as peyote and marijuana. Meeting last week at San Francisco's University of California Medical Center, 200 experts in psychiatry and pharmacology concentrated instead on the many other mind-altering drugs that are far older historically but now seem new because they have yet to be thoroughly investigated.
The conference participants showed a certain sense of urgency because most of these substances are still known only to relatively primitive peoples whose cultures are being bulldozed away by developing countries. The "psychoactive" substances under study ranged from amanita muscaria to yagé, from snuffs to enemas. They extend from the Andes across Polynesia to the East Indies, from the Siberian valley of the Yenisei to Hindu Kush and the Mediterranean. Among the most discussed:
> EPENA, a potent snuff, is produced by the naked Waika Indians of northern Brazil—a tribe so backward that they have not yet discovered pots. But their hallucinatory snuff can induce a "trip" faster than LSD. Made from the bark of the epena and ama asita trees, epena is administered through a blowpipe. The tripster puts one end of the pipe to his nostril, and a helper gives a full-lunged blast that sends the snuff deep into the nasal passages. At first reeling and retching from the impact, the snuff taker soon straightens up, begins to strut, emits an occasional laugh or yell, and slaps his thighs in selfesteem. Evidently, the Waika on epena experiences what the psychiatrists call macropsia: in his eyes everything is enormously magnified, including himself. He sees gigantic animals and birds. He feels not 10 ft. but 10,000 ft. tall, for his head is among the clouds. And after he has slept off his trip, he reports that he has talked with the häkula, the great spirits—although one Waika who had been to a mission school said that he had talked with the angels.
> PARICÁ is another snuff, ground and inhaled by the equally primitive Piaroa Indians of southern Venezuela. It has several active ingredients, two containing substances of a type found in brain tissue and another chemically similar to "psychic energizers." So, by centuries-old accident, the Piaroa anticipated modern psychiatrists who only recently discovered that by using several classes of drugs together, they can achieve a synergistic effect—one that is greater than the sum of the separate components. The effects of paricá are little known; no one but the tribal medicine man is allowed to use it, and his state can only be described as one of intoxication in which he stammers confused words.
> AYAHUASCA, a drink made from plants by various tribes of the western Andean slopes, is essentially the same as two other psychoactive drugs, yagé and caapi. While something has been learned of its effects and composition from on-the-spot studies, more may soon be learned on the University of California's Berkeley campus. For there, following its mention in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, yagé is now being peddled surreptitiously as "the jungle drug" or "the tiger drug." So far, those who have taken the substance have not told scientific investigators of its effects.