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> FLY AGARIC (amanita muscaria) is a mushroom that sprouts across most of the northern part of Europe and Asia. R. Gordon Wasson, who tracked down the "magic mushrooms" of Mexico (TIME, June 16, 1958), suspects it of being identical with the legendary Hindu substance called soma, the inspiration for much of Aldous Huxley's phamacofantasies. Fly agaric, he reported, induces two hours of deep yet semiconscious sleep followed by three or four hours of extraordinary elation and hallucinations, while unusual physical effort becomes possible.
> KAVA, the ceremonial beverage of the Polynesians, is not strictly speaking hallucinogenic. But when quaffed at the end of a hard day at the copra mill, kava sends its user into a dream world of detached contemplation, leaving no hangover. It is so much a part of island life that in 1914, when Ratu Su-Kuna, the future head of the Fijian government, set off to study at Oxford, he could not bear the thought of leaving kava behind. He had a brew prepared of the pepper root (Piper methysticum), let dozens of bowls of it dry in the sun, and then carried the stuff off to England. Whenever he felt the need, he mixed a batch with water: instant kava. Now, decades later, there may soon be a kava-cola. A somewhat less potent version of the traditional grog is already the bestseller at Polynesian roadside stands.
The scientists gathered in San Francisco acknowledged that the identification and introduction of new mind-expanding drugs will inevitably provoke fringe-group experimentation—given the realities of today. "Those dated objectives of adequate food, housing and racial equality" are now within sight, observed Dr. Nathan Kline, director of research at New York's Rockland State Hospital. "The sense of great purpose and broad adventure which those goals engendered have vanished." Hence, "curiosity and action are directed inward," and drugs that "sever the tenuous ties with the outside world are highly prized." Yet, concludes Kline, "dissociation per se has no value."
What does have value is greater knowledge, and the researchers' interest is more than idle curiosity. Some of the substances used by primitive man should prove helpful for research into the workings of the human nervous system. By determining just how the drugs work, the psychopharmocologists hope some day to tame psychoactive drugs into predictable tools for psychiatric research and treatment.