part0051

Before leaving Hawaii, I shipped my books and a few other things worth keeping to a friend in Seattle. Upon arriving there in the summer of 1979, I borrowed her car and drove to Vancouver, found a scuzzy apartment, unloaded my stuff, and headed back to the States for a month with friends and family in Colorado. In Paonia, I paid $400 at a local garage for a 1973 Mercury Monterey, a huge thing that had literally been driven to the post office and back by a little old lady. With the cruise control set and the AM/FM radio cranked up, I floated to Vancouver in what turned out to be great wheels, a perfect road machine I’d drive for the next five years.

By late summer, I was eager to start the new semester and begin my research. Like most foreign graduate students at the University of British Columbia, I had a two-year fellowship that would be renewed for another two years if I kept up my grades. I’d already completed a lot of my work in Hawaii—in plant physiology, biometrics, calculus, and plant biochemistry. My first two courses at UBC were in fungal genetics and advanced organic chemistry. Both were a challenge, and I was under a lot of pressure to excel. Among the many good incentives to keep my fellowship was that it relieved me of any teaching duties, giving me more time to focus on my research.

My research supervisor, Neil Towers, ran his lab as an incubator for a succession of eccentric but brilliant students. For Neil, our work was as much a social activity as a scientific one, but his standards were high. By then, we had agreed that my project was to characterize the enzymes involved in psilocybin and psilocin biosynthesis. For this, of course, I was well prepared. I knew all about growing mushrooms as a result of my extracurricular hobbies. Health Canada, the country’s public health department, had helpfully provided the synthetic psilocybin and psilocin I needed for my analytical work. My first task was to develop methods for detecting and quantifying these two metabolites in fungal cultures and fruiting bodies. I requisitioned a growth chamber in the basement of the biology building, and for most of that fall and spring I had it stuffed with prolifically fruiting jars.

My first-year goals were to devise techniques for extracting psilocybin and psilocin from the mushrooms, and then develop ways of using “high-performance liquid chromatography” and “thin-layer chromatography” to analyze and quantify those extracts. Once these methods had been perfected, the reasoning went, we’d extract the biosynthetic enzymes from the fruiting bodies or the mycelium and incubate radioactively tagged precursors with them, and then quantify the resulting products: psilocybin, psilocin, and their intermediates. In a later phase, we planned to look at the genetic regulation of biosynthesis in the mushrooms. To do so, we’d first use mutagenic agents to make mutant strains, select these, and then examine the variations in the biosynthetic products associated with them. I never got to that point, as I’ll explain; but I did manage to develop some reliable analytical methods.

I didn’t know any of the other graduate students when I first arrived at UBC. I was an outsider, an American, and a loner, but as in Hawaii, I soon met other kindred spirits. One was Terry, a “moss man” from Ontario working on bryophytes under a prominent taxonomist in the field, the late Wilf Scofield. Terry was never into mushrooms or psychedelics, but he was peculiar enough in the best of ways without them. Another wonderfully odd new friend was Paul, who wasn’t actually a student, but a renowned amateur mycologist whose interest in the “neurotropic” species led him to discover and name several British Columbian Psilocybe species over the years. When I started hanging out with these folks, we’d retire every Friday to the graduate student center on campus and drink beer—strong, Canadian beer—and I’d get smashed. It wasn’t really my thing, but the camaraderie was a pleasure.

During my first semester, in the fall of 1979, I had moved into another dreary basement suite in West Point Grey. I then bought a used bike so I could commute to school along the bike trail that wound through the Endowment Lands, a kind of green belt between my neighborhood and the campus. A construction crew had been working along a road that ran parallel to the trail. One day the construction crew dug a trench eight feet deep and twenty feet long right in the middle of the bike path, as I unluckily discovered that night. I left the lab late; it was rainy, dark, and dreary, and I thought I was coming down with a cold. I climbed on the bike to start home, and my bike light was pathetically weak on the wet pavement. The crew had placed a small sawhorse mounted with a flashing light at the lip of the trench—not six or eight feet in front of it, but right at the edge. By the time I got there, the warning light had either died or was barely working. In the darkness and the rain, I plowed through it and went head over heels into the trench with the bike landing on top of me.

I briefly lost consciousness. When I came to, I assessed the situation. The top of the trench was a couple feet above my head, and I had broken something. It was very painful to stand; I couldn’t put all my weight on my left leg. I realized I had pushed the only barrier to the trench out of the way, meaning another cyclist was very likely to plunge in on top of me. I started to shout as loud as I could and shined my bike light out of the trench. In fact, what I had feared was narrowly averted; another botany graduate student was a few minutes behind me on the trail. He heard my screams and helped me get out of the trench. Another rider soon headed off to call an ambulance.

I had a hairline pelvic fracture, a concussion, and compressed vertebrae. I spent the next two weeks Vancouver General Hospital, my first introduction to the Canadian health care system. The final bill for the excellent treatment I got there totaled $7.50. In today’s acrimonious political climate, American conservatives love to bash the Canadian health care system, but it has provided high-quality universal coverage for all Canadians (and American students) since 1962. I find it sickening that our country has yet to enact something as effective, and probably never will.

My injuries called for bed rest followed by physical therapy. Seeing as how I was in the process of failing organic chemistry, my hospital stay provided a graceful exit from that dilemma. When I got out, I remained on crutches for eight weeks and had daily physical therapy. I also resumed practicing yoga, as I had been doing in Hawaii, and that may have accelerated my recovery. I was still in a lot of pain, and couldn’t easily get around on my crutches, so I tended to hole up in my cold and damp apartment, covered in blankets. Occasionally, I’d get the energy to drive to campus and check my mail. I’m sure I cut a pathetic figure as I hobbled into the botany department mailroom. At least one person seemed to think so, a cute graduate student named Sheila with beautiful long red hair. I was struck by her and tried not to show it, but we exchanged friendly greetings.

As the winter and spring wore on, I gradually recovered. I continued to stay home a lot studying for my comprehensive exams, which I passed without incident in May. In July, the department hosted Botany 80, a large conference that brought in more than a thousand botanists from around the world, including some of my colleagues and friends from Hawaii. As students in the host department, we were enlisted to help with logistics. My job was to greet arriving dignitaries at the Vancouver airport, and I was surprised and delighted to find that Sheila had been assigned to the same group. Typically, I broke the ice by bumming a cigarette. With little to do except hang at the airport waiting for various flights to arrive, we had time to get to know each other. She was currently in a master’s program studying algae under Dr. Bob DeWreede, who had studied under Maxwell Doty, a notoriously tyrannical phycologist at the University of Hawaii.

At the same time that Botany 80 was in full swing, so was the Vancouver Folk Festival, one of the biggest such events in North America. On a slow night at the conference I decided to check out the festival. I remembered Sheila mentioning she liked folk music, and I was hoping I might run into her there, though that seemed unlikely in a crowd of 10,000. As it happened, I’d only been there half an hour when I literally stumbled over her sitting on a blanket in front of the main stage. And she was alone. I knew she’d recently been going out with a fellow botany student, but his tastes apparently ran more to classical music rather than folk; so there she was, a lovely and unaccompanied redhead. I pretended to be nonchalant about it, but my wish had come true.

We soon moved to the edge of the crowd and fell into conversation, sharing our life stories. Sheila had grown up in the interior of British Columbia, the daughter of a rancher outside of Kamloops. She had three siblings: a sister about fourteen years older, a brother about nine years older, and another sister two years younger. Many of her experiences growing up were not unlike mine in Paonia, although she’d lived on a ranch and I was what she called a “townie.” She was a bookworm like me and had a quick mind and strong opinions. She loved to argue, I quickly learned, and was a good match in conversational give-and-take. We both were children of the sixties who had done our time in hippie houses and been influenced by the counterculture. We talked to the end of the concert and then reluctantly parted.

It was clear there was a deep resonance between us. I at least was intrigued and wanted to see her again as soon as possible, all the more so when I learned that she and her boyfriend were breaking up. By mid-August I’d moved again, to a different part of Point Grey. I invited Sheila over to hang out, and she ended up spending the night. That was the start of something, but I wasn’t sure what. I had no idea she’d become my wife or that one day we’d be the proud parents of a daughter. I only knew that she seemed to enjoy my company as much as I enjoyed hers.

My work with the Psilocybes continued into the fall of 1980, but I was having trouble keeping my interest up. I had begun to doubt whether fulfillment lay in the direction of fungal genetics and enzymology. One day in mid-October, Neil called me into his office. “I’ve got a little extra money in the grant this year,” he said, “would you be interested in going to Peru?”

He handed me a flyer from an outfit called the Institute of Ecotechnics. From what I gathered, the institute owned a research vessel, the RV Heraclitus , and they were soliciting scientists to join their Amazon expedition the following spring. For a relatively modest cost, they would provide a berth on the boat, meals, and access to some of the remotest collection areas in the Peruvian Amazon. It sounded too good to be true, and as we found out later, it was.

But with my supervisor waving dollars and the chance of an Amazonian adventure in front of me, how could I turn him down? For one thing, I immediately recognized it as a chance to redeem myself: I wanted to prove that I could return to the Amazon and do real science this time—and not go crazy. January 1981 would be the tenth anniversary of my first and only trip to the Amazon, the journey that took us to La Chorrera and beyond. This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

So I dropped my psilocybin thesis project and rewrote my entire program. Instead of working on the enzymes and genetics of Psilocybe , I would direct my efforts toward a comparative investigation of the botany, ethnobotany, chemistry, and pharmacology of two important Amazonian hallucinogens: ayahuasca, and oo-koo-hé , the orally active preparation made from Virola species that had first lured us to La Chorrera. It was an interesting project. Both substances were orally active hallucinogens with DMT as the apparent active compound. In the case of ayahuasca, the monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibiting beta-carboline alkaloids in the stems and bark of a liana, Banisteriopsis caapi , apparently allowed the DMT in the leaves of the admixture plants to be orally activated. In theory, the MAO inhibitors in the brew blocked the gut enzymes that normally degraded DMT. As a result, the DMT entered the circulation unchanged and from there readily crossed the blood-brain barrier. The hypothesis seemed reasonable, but no one had actually proven it. Oo-koo-hé was even more poorly understood. The substance involved no admixture plants, or none that were known. The sap of various Virola species that were high in DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and related compounds was cooked down to a thick paste, mixed with ashes, and ingested in the form of little pastilles or pills.

All this posed a fascinating riddle. Here were two Amazonian hallucinogens derived from entirely separate botanical sources, both ingested orally, both having tryptamines—namely, DMT—as their active hallucinogenic components. In the case of ayahuasca, the mechanism seemed to involve the blockade of MAO by the beta-carbolines. But for oo-koo-hé , the mode of action was much less clear: the active hallucinogens were tryptamines, but did the Virola sap also contain its own MAO blockers? It seemed like a reasonable explanation—in fact, I knew that tryptamines and beta-carbolines were closely related compounds that occasionally were found in the same plants. But no one had yet determined if Virola sap contained beta-carbolines or not.

The two hallucinogens occupied different ethnographic niches, as well. Ayahuasca was used in the Amazon by many indigenous groups, and had been adopted into mestizo folk medicine. Many admixture plants were associated with it, and there were almost as many different blends as there were individual ayahuasqueros . In contrast, oo-koo-hé had a highly restricted cultural distribution. It appeared to be used only among the Witoto and the closely related Bora and Muinane tribes. The alkaloid chemistry of some Virola species had been studied to a certain degree, but oo-koo-hé itself had not been. If the paste contained admixture plants, they were unknown.

It seemed like the ideal thesis project, just waiting for me to get my arms around it. My first objective was to collect as many samples of each preparation as possible, along with specimens of their plant ingredients. From an ethnomedical perspective, I wanted to document how the substances were prepared and applied. Back in the lab, I’d develop methods for determining if those constituents contained tryptamines and beta-carbolines and, if so, how much. Finally, I’d devise assays to measure MAO inhibition and then evaluate sample extracts for this activity.

With my course now redirected, I pursued my work with renewed enthusiasm. Meanwhile, as winter neared, my relationship with Sheila deepened. We were spending a lot of time together, and I was definitely smitten. I discovered she was an excellent cook with a special flair for Indonesian food and a gift for accomplishing culinary marvels on a single hotplate. Even better! It’s sometimes said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and in Sheila’s case there was some truth to that. Without quite realizing it, I was falling in love again.