jonathan ott speaks (interview part 1), medyczne- książki j ang
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VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 1
VERNAL EQUINOX 1999
J
ONATHAN
O
TT
S
PEAKS
…
Interviewed by Will Beifuss and Jon Hanna at the 1998 BPC
Salvia divinorum
Conference
Jon:
Jon: Maybe we should start off by talking a little bit about
the products that you’ve been working on?
cological engineering, and theorizing, we’re going to start
doing it. And whatever we can do now, undercapitalized
without a lot of resources. And our first product will be
Pharmahuasca®. Those who are familiar with
The Entheogen
Review
and other publications surely know that it’s more or
less a code-word for an ayahuasca analogue made with pure
compounds, as opposed to plant extracts or teas or infusions.
And there are possibilities of making them legally. The
MAOI—the ayahuasca alkaloids—ß-carbolines, are not con-
trolled anywhere to my knowledge except in Japan. As for
the tryptamines, in Europe DMT is the only one that’s con-
trolled, unless you classify LSD and ibogaine as tryptamines,
which certainly they are. But of the simple, what I call the
short-acting tryptamines, DMT is the only one that is con-
trolled. Not even bufotenine is controlled in Europe. And so
that gives you quite a lot of latitude for different tryptamines
that can be added. So we’re going to make this as two sepa-
rate pills, one of which is the N
ATURAL
H
ERBAL
R
ELAXANT
, which
is a minimal MAOI dose of ß-carboline, and the other one is
the N
ATURAL
H
ERBAL
T
ONIC
, which is a minimal psychotropic
dose of a short-acting tryptamine which is legal. And so one
tablet of the one, plus one to three tablets of the other will
Jonathan:
Jonathan: Okay, well… When I was in Amsterdam for the
P
SYCHOACTIVITY
conference, somebody asked me in an inter-
view what my next book was going to be. And for some rea-
son without even thinking about it I said, “I don’t know if
I’ll write another book.” And in general that’s the way I work.
I don’t plan books and then write one. I get interested in
something and do a little research on it, and then if a book
comes out of it I suddenly know that. I find the A
RIADNE
’
S
thread that tells me the book is there, and so then it’s a pro-
cess of following the thread and getting it out. Going into
the labyrinth sort of. And that hadn’t happened. And so I
didn’t in fact have a book planned. And so I just said that.
But then in Uxmál I had met a Dutch woman—I
RIS
VAN
DEN
H
URK
—who’s in the C
ONSCIOUS
D
REAMS
organization; her
brother started it, and she had proposed that we start a busi-
ness together, and in fact that happened. And the business
is called P
HARMACOPHILIA
. And so now I would have added to
that interview, “I think I’ll just live my last book for a while.”
(laughter) And so instead of talking about psychopharma-
“…some people do want to vomit and they see it as an
overall purification. I tend to see it more as a toxic
side-effect of an overdose…”
“The
real
drug-problem is that we need more and
better drugs.”
“…it seems pretty clear to me that shamans are the
pharmacognosists, or the natural-products scientists
of the preliterate world.”
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THE ENTHEOGEN REVIEW, 564 MISSION STREET, BOX 808, SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94105
VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 1
VERNAL EQUINOX 1999
give a three- to four-hour
pharmahuasca
experience.
that some people get nausea from higher doses, and with
ayahuasca in the Amazon, as you both know, one common
denominator to ayahuasca is ayahuasca stem—it’s really the
only
common denominator. In some areas that’s all that’s
used. In some areas it’s just a cold-water, aqueous infusion
of ayahuasca stem with no additives. In some areas it’s cooked
for up to the better part of a day, and may have a half-a-dozen
additives at once, of which the best-known are the
tryptamine-plants like
chacruna
, which is
Psychotria viridis
—
DMT-containing. But tobacco,
coca
,
guayusa
—which is a
caffeine plant—
Brugmansia
, even cacti; there are about a
hundred different additives and quite a number of possible
permutations. And so they call ayahuasca in the Amazon
la
purga
, the purge, because it is purgative. If you take a high
enough dose it causes nausea and vomiting. And, some
people want that, and certainly in shamanism and in the
ethnomedicinal context that’s of key importance and it’s re-
ally fundamental to this—much more than the vision-induc-
ing plants are, which are more of use in diagnosis. But mainly
the patients want the purgative effect, and it may well be
therapeutic for them, in cases of intestinal parasites. But I
find, and I think that probably your readers would agree with
this, that in the ayahuasca analogue or
pharmahuasca
camp,
people are more interested in the
visions
than in curing them-
selves of intestinal parasites (laughter) or vomiting, although
some people do want to vomit and they see it as an overall
purification. I tend to see it more as a toxic side-effect of an
overdose of these ß-carboline alkaloids. And in fact what we
already know—that you only need something in the realm
of 100 to 150 mg of ß-carboline in a single dose—speaking
of harmine and harmaline, which are the most active ones
and the main components of ayahuasca plants—you only
need that much to render tryptamines active orally. And I’ve
always operated with the assumption that we didn’t wish to
take any more, because then you start getting these nauseous
side-effects. And also the evidence is more-or-less compel-
ling that the effects are pharmacologically contrary. While it
does make DMT active orally, it makes it weaker than it is by
any other route, because it seemingly works against it in the
brain. And there are a couple of mechanisms that have been
proposed to explain that. But it definitely is not a “potentia-
tion” as far as the psychoactive effects are concerned. So we’ve
worked on minimizing that dose, because you kind of walk
that fine line where you want to make sure that it works for
the great majority of the people, but you don’t want to get
into the nausea territory either. So that’s a little bit tricky.
Jon:
Jon: Getting a little more specific, the ß-carboline is going to
be harmine HCl?
Jonathan:
Jonathan: Rather, free-base harmaline.
Jon:
Jon: And the tryptamine is 5-MeO-DMT?
Jonathan:
Jonathan: Right.
Jon:
Jon: Are there any plans for other tryptamines?
Jonathan:
Jonathan: Yes. And also perhaps other dosage forms of the
existing tryptamines, because my research lately has involved
making psychonautic models of the visionary snuffs of South
America, of which there are two basic categories: the
yopo
/
cebil
category is the Leguminous
Anadenanthera
. Most people
know it by
yopo
, but the commercial activity now focuses on
cebil
, which is the Southern Andean species
Anadenanthera
colubrina
—both contain bufotenine. I should say that
yopo
and
cebil
are seeds—they’re made from leguminous seeds.
And the other class besides
niopo
—not to be confused with
yoco
—is
epéna
or
nyakwana
, and various names from the
Orinoco in the Northern Amazon.
These are made from a resin of a bark of various species of
Virola
, which are in the nutmeg family, Myristicaceae. And
in the case of the nutmeg family,
Virola
snuffs, the major ac-
tive principle is 5-MeO-DMT. Everyone’s focused on DMT
because we like DMT, and we’re interested in it. But in fact,
as far as traditional entheogens go, we can say only in the
case of ayahuasca is DMT a major active-principle. In the
snuffs it’s a minor component in both cases. And 5-MeO-
DMT is in fact about four or five times more potent than
DMT. With bufotenine we still don’t know—there’s very little
comparative pharmacology on that. So my research is focus-
ing on the snuffs now, and I’m making psychonautic models
of these snuffs with pure compounds. And we ultimately plan
to introduce visionary snuffs as well.
Jon:
Jon: That sounds great.
Will:
Will: What is the dosage of the harmaline and the 5-MeO-
DMT on these first products?
Jonathan:
Jonathan: Well, I’d rather not say because we’re still doing a
bit of final R & D on it, and we haven’t quite fixed what will
be the final dosage of it. The problem with the ß-carboline is
Jon: Will the tryptamine-containing pills possibly serve sort
of a double duty; can you crush them up and vaporize them?
Jon:
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VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 1
VERNAL EQUINOX 1999
Jonathan: I hadn’t really thought about that. They could be
extracted, of course, from the pills. And we’re certainly not
going to do what they do in the pharmaceutical industry of
actually conducting intensive R & D efforts to make that dif-
ficult for the consumer. We’re certainly
not
going to bind
them to ion-exchange resins, or mix in all kinds of crap so
that you won’t be able to purify them. But no, I hadn’t actu-
ally thought about that. But yeah… that would be possible,
to extract it from the pills. And it will be in the form of the
free-base, and so that will be easy, because the binders and
so-forth won’t be soluble in the solvents that the free-base of
the tryptamine would be soluble in, and so it would be a fairly
straightforward thing to extract them from the pills. In fact,
you’re right—probably a lot of people would want to do that.
I prefer the effect orally of the tryptamines to smoked all the
way across the board with every one that I’ve tried, but I know
that probably I’m in the minority there.
Jonathan:
the
Virola
, which they call
nyakwana
, and the
Anadenanthera
snuff they call
hisioma
, which they have to trade for. But they
very much prefer the
Anadenanthera
snuff because it is more
potent, and also I think it’s just easier to prepare. In the case
of the
Virola
you have to strip the bark off of the tree, heat it
so that it exudes this resin, scrape up the resin, and then dry
that, powder it, and make the snuff. And in the case of the
seeds you simply toast the seeds and crush them and you
have the snuff. And so generally speaking, we know from the
phytochemical study there are about 13 species of
Virola
that
have been shown to contain tryptamines—mainly 5-MeO-
DMT, smaller amounts of DMT, and also—which is also
probably active—the mono-methyl equivalents, the mono-
methyl tryptamine and 5-MeO-mono-methyl. And up until
now we really don’t have a lot of
data
on those pharmaco-
logically, and they’re other possible targets for future snuff/
pharmahuasca
products, even if there is some legal response
to selling these things as legal products, there are an infini-
tude of new tryptamines that can be trotted out and tried in
this kind of combination. We know that the
Virola
resins—
even these prepared resins powdered up and so forth—are
fairly low in tryptamines. And just the raw seed of
Anadenanthera colubrina
, the best strains—again they’re us-
ing
A. peregrina
—but the best strains of
A. colubrina
from
Northern Argentina, yield more bufotenine by weight than
these prepared resins do of the
Virola
. And so it seems pretty
clear to me that shamans are the pharmacognosists, or the
natural-products scientists of the preliterate world. And
they’re really interested in what we would call alkaloids and
pharmacological potency, and generally speaking they’re fas-
cinated by chemical technology, and they want easier access
and more potency just as we do. They’re
just the same as we are, they’re just in a
different context.
Jon: Going back to your comments about the nutmeg fam-
ily. I remember reading in
The Ethnopharmacologic Search for
Psychoactive Drugs
, there was some discussion about the nut-
meg seeds
themselves
being more effective than the isolated
myristicin-elemicin fraction. The thing that I’m thinking of
now that we’re here at the
Salvia divinorum
conference, is
that there are a lot of terpenoid-type compounds in those
seeds also. Do you know if anyone has looked at those for
activity?
Jon:
Jonathan: In the
Anadenanthera
seeds no, I don’t know, but I
don’t think that that has happened. I don’t know for a fact.
Yeah, it is true that in the Northern part of Brazil where it
Jonathan:
I prefer the effect orally of the tryptamines to
I prefer the effect orally of the tryptamines to
smoked all the way across the board with every one
smoked all the way across the board with every one
smoked all the way across the board with every one
that I’ve tried, but I know that probably I’m in the
that I’ve tried, but I know that probably I’m in the
that I’ve tried, but I know that probably I’m in the
minority there.
Jon:
Jon: There was a report in the 1996
Year-
book of Ethnomedicine
by T
ORRES
and
R
EPKE
, an analysis of one of the varieties
of
Anadenanthera colubrina
seeds…
minority there.
borders with the Guianas and Venezuela, where live the
Waiká people, of whom the Yanomamö are the most famous,
they’ve used both types; they use the
Virola
snuffs, which
grow in their ecosystem. And they’re heavily into snuffs—
they’re not ayahuasca takers
per se
, but they use the snuffs
very regularly, ‘though some of the groups are undoubtedly
familiar with ayahuasca. But
Virola
grows in their ecosystem,
and they also use
Anadenanthera
, which grows in the Carib-
bean and in the savanna ecosystem, which is some distance
from where they live. And they use much more frequently
Jonathan: Yeah, variety
cebil
, from Argentina.
Jonathan:
Jon: One of which tested out at 12.4% bufotenine, with hardly
anything else in it…
Jon:
Jonathan: Right, exactly.
Jonathan:
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VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 1
VERNAL EQUINOX 1999
Jon:
Jon: And I’ve spoken with a number of people who, using
that
particular
seed, have had very pleasant visionary effects,
not at all along the lines of what has been traditionally de-
scribed for bufotenine, and also not along the lines of what
other people who have tried other
Anadenanthera
seeds have
told me about. With the
Anadenanthera
seeds it seems that
there is a great variability in response.
Some people have a terrible time, and
other people appear to like it quite a bit.
One person here at this conference has
told me that it is his favorite tryptamine.
of other similar compounds. I think there is one report in
the literature of as much as 18% nicotine in a tobacco strain—
that’s the only thing I know that is even in the ballpark. With
peyote, which is a virtual factory of alkaloids, the total alka-
loidal content is about 8%, and there are more than 50…
It was like a general, very significant painful burn-
It was like a general, very significant painful burn-
ing that was experienced in the entire head all over
ing that was experienced in the entire head all over
the scalp. It was so painful that it just referred the
ing that was experienced in the entire head all over
the scalp. It was so painful that it just referred the
the scalp. It was so painful that it just referred the
pain all over the region. And it was literally like
Jonathan:
Jonathan: From having tried the seeds, or
the pure compound?
pain all over the region. And it was literally like
pain all over the region. And it was literally like
you wanted to bang your head into the wall to dis-
you wanted to bang your head into the wall to dis-
you wanted to bang your head into the wall to dis-
tract from it and make it go away.
Jon:
Jon: Well, from having tried the seeds.
tract from it and make it go away.
Jonathan: Right. Well, again, we’re deal-
ing with two different species. The
Anadenanthera peregrina
—
the Caribbean species—is lower in tryptamines in general
than
A. colubrina
. And also, the few people that I know, in-
cluding myself, that have tried
A. peregrina
preparations, for
some reason it really significantly burns like hell in the nose.
And we’re not just talking about a mild thing. When I tried
one of these, and I’m afraid I don’t know the exact composi-
tion—it may have had tobacco in it also, as it was from an
enthomedicinal collection from an anthropologist—it was
like a general, very significant painful burning that was ex-
perienced in the entire head all over the scalp. It was so pain-
ful that it just referred the pain all over the region. And it
was literally like you wanted to bang your head into the wall
to distract from it and make it go away. And I’ve only had
just mild irritation from the
cebil
seed, which you would think
would be a very similar seed. So there is some kind of real
irritant possibly present in the
A. peregrina
that’s not in the
A. colubrina
, or it has to do with how this particular snuff
was prepared. But R
OB
M
ONTGOMERY
had done it also, from
just plain seed that he had collected in the savanna area there
and just ground up himself, the
A. peregrina
seed, and had a
similar kind of effect, and I don’t think there was any addi-
tive except possibly a little ash. He described the sensation
like “broken glass.” So that could have something to do with
it. Also, as you noted, R
EPKE
and T
ORRES
found that the high-
est-yielding strain, which was from the shaman’s own pri-
vate-stash tree that he had right next to his house, was some
12 or 13%, almost all bufotenine—there was only trace
amounts of one other tryptamine—and that’s really unusual.
Anything over 10% of total alkaloid content is unusual to
begin with, much less of a
single compound
without a range
Jonathan:
Jon: What about opium?
Jon:
Jonathan: The total alkaloid content is about 15% in the best
strains, and it’s mainly morphine, but in the case of peyote
and opium you’re dealing with many dozens of alkaloids, and
in the case of peyote it’s only about 30% of this 8% alkaloids
that’s mescaline, which is the main visionary compound.
Jonathan:
So this is really unusual. But unfortunately you alluded to
the traditional information that we have about bufotenine,
which of course was placed in Schedule I from the very be-
ginning, and in any case would be controlled whether it were
in Schedule I or not, as it’s a positional isomer of psilocin,
and the law says “any salt, isomer, or salt of isomer.” So it’s
already covered as an isomer—not even by the Analog law.
But it was given by i.v. injection to prisoners at the O
HIO
S
TATE
P
ENITENTIARY
in 1955, and then in a New York mental institu-
tion by some real mad scientists in 1959. And they were ac-
tually injecting this into people’s bloodstreams, which is re-
ally a dumb idea, because remember this is 5-hydroxy-DMT,
so it’s dimethyl-serotonin, because 5-hydroxy-tryptamine is
serotonin. It’s called serotonin from
sero tonin
—toning the
blood, blood-pressure, because there are a lot of serotonin
receptors in the bloodstream. It’s not just a neuro-receptor.
It would be like injecting serotonin, and they had definite
cerebral crises—in one case they said their faces turned the
color of an eggplant and the other they said that their faces
turned the color of a plum. And of course these guys didn’t
try it on themselves; they were using captive guinea pigs. And
in a really unethical way. So if we’re talking about the memes
that get spread about a certain compound, well this one re-
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VOLUME VIII, NUMBER 1
VERNAL EQUINOX 1999
ally started off on the wrong foot because right away it was
used in the worst possible way. And they were not able to
establish visionary activity.
exists as a kind of a snuff-product as well. And what we call
the “ayahuasca-effect,” the MAOI plus tryptamine interac-
tion, was actually proposed originally in the context of the
snuffs by H
OLMSTEDT
and L
INDGREN
in the book you men-
tioned,
The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs
,
in 1967. They were reporting that because one analysis done
by an Italian group of a snuff preparation found ayahuasca
alkaloids—clearly signature alkaloids for the ayahuasca plant
itself, in South America—harmine and harmaline. And also
there was a museum-collection of snuff-plants that had
ayahuasca stem as one of the plants that was added to the
snuff. And so this was originally proposed because they had
this assumption of, “Oh, well these things don’t work in the
nose, so you must need to add the MAOI, and then the com-
bination of the ß-carbolines from ayahuasca, plus these
tryptamines in the snuff-plant, makes it active in the nose.
Then later people forgot about that, and no one’s ever gone
back to try and model the snuffs. We just fixated on
ayahuasca itself, and around the same time it was reported
that ayahuasca brews contained DMT, and they’d already
long been known to contain the ß-carbolines. But it wasn’t
until 1965 that it was definitively shown that they contained
DMT, and so then people fixated on that and everyone for-
got about the snuffs. But it’s time to go back to the snuffs,
because we can render all of these tryptamines active in the
nose as well, it’s just a matter of finding the right way, and I
think you will find… my prediction is that the pharmacology
will show that the activity is somewhat intermediate between
‘smoking’ or inhaling the free-base vapor and taking it orally
in some kind of MAOI combination. And also, it’s been as-
sumed blanketly across the board that these compounds are
inactive orally. We know DMT is inactive orally, we know
that 4-hydroxy-DMT, meaning psilocin, is quite active orally,
but it seemingly is also a substrate for MAOI, because people
are saying that if they take the mushrooms with a mono-
amine-oxidase-inhibitor—Syrian rue, or whatever—they get
a better effect. And the only way I can rationalize that is by
thinking, “Okay, they’re getting better absorption in the
stomach, because some of it is getting chopped-up by mono-
amine-oxidase in the stomach before it’s absorbed.”
They did these studies because in 1954, in the
Journal of the
American Chemical Society
, it was reported that the seed-pods
of
Anadenanthera
contained DMT and contained also bufo-
tenine—which alone had been found in the seeds. These
compounds had been synthesized decades before, and it had
never occurred to anyone to test them pharmacologically.
And so suddenly, because of this snuff information—they
knew that
A. peregrina
was made into a snuff, and so forth—
these same scientists tried making a snuff out of the pure
bufotenine first, but it didn’t work. But they were doing also
kind of a stupid thing—they were spraying it in water into
the nose in a soluble salt; I think it was the oxalate salt of
bufotenine. And S
ASHA
S
HULGIN
has even said that he doubts
that these compounds are active in the nose, but that’s just
not true. They’re active as the free-base, but they’re not ac-
tive as soluble salts. And this is somewhat counter-intuitive,
because for example, everyone thinks in terms of cocaine,
and while the hydrochloride salt is very active in the nose,
the free-base isn’t so active in the nose.
Jon:
Jon: Right, right.
Jonathan:
Jonathan: But then when you chew
coca
, it doesn’t do any-
thing unless you add base. And so then in the case of the
free-base, it is clearly absorbed well in the mouth. There’s
something screwy about the models, and I am not a mem-
brane physiologist, but some enterprising graduate student
should do a thorough study of different methods of chewing
tobacco,
coca
,
qat
.
Qat
is an example of one that’s
not
used
with base, it’s just chewed by itself. But tobacco generally is
basified, so is
coca
, so is
betel
, and so a general study of mas-
ticatories and snuffs from the standpoint of pharmaco-
dynamics of membrane transfer of alkaloids would be a real
interesting subject, and I think it would turn up some things
that go a little bit beyond the sort-of simplistic models that
have been proposed for how that might work.
So anyway, to get back to bufotenine. Unfortunately, we don’t
really have much more to go on, besides the antics of the
mad scientists. While a few people in a very sporadic way in
the drug-scene have done their own bioassays here and there,
no one’s reported them. And so that’s why my intention now
is to do pharmacological modeling both on 5-MeO-DMT,
which I’ve already started, and on bufotenine, and on DMT
as well, because we have reason to believe also that ayahuasca
But I think that 5-MeO-DMT is slightly active orally just by
itself, without any monoamine-oxidase-inhibitor. And I sus-
pect that bufotenine will prove to be active by itself, at least
as much so as 5-MeO-DMT. So I’m working on modeling all
of this: the pure compounds in snuffs, basically 5-MeO-DMT,
bufotenine, and DMT, and also orally, combined with MAOI
and without. And also sublingually—that’s also a potential
way to…
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