‘Mescalito’, tattoo art.

In 1960 Weston La Barre, whose 1938 monograph The Peyote Cult had been long established as the standard scholarly work on the subject, undertook another ethnographic field trip from his academic base at Duke University. This time his destination was not Oklahoma but New York, where he had heard reports of a new peyote cult centred round the Dollar Sign coffee house at 306 East Street on the Lower East Side. There was no name above the door, merely a dollar sign, and the window was dominated by a cage containing eight monkeys. La Barre discovered that the ‘bearded and barefoot proprietor’, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate named Barron Bruchlos, was selling gelatine caps filled with powdered peyote for 50 to 75 cents apiece.1

La Barre was scornful of Aldous Huxley’s claims that peyote – ‘which Huxley persisted in calling by the long-discarded and quite incorrect name “mescal”’ – was ‘a chemical key to the mystical state, a sort of instant Zen’.² Generally, he was of the opinion that most white peyotists from Havelock Ellis onwards had been ‘ethnologically spurious, meretricious and foolish poseurs’.³ He was shocked, however, to learn that two undercover federal officers had recently visited the Dollar Sign, bought some peyote capsules and then raided the premises, confiscating 145 capsules and over 300 pounds of dried buttons. Bruchlos had been buying his peyote from registered wholesalers around Laredo, Texas, and even had stock that he had bought directly from federal government auctions, stamped with Department of Agriculture seals certifying that they were pest-free. There was, as La Barre observed, ‘no federal law against the transportation, sale and use of peyote’ and charges were eventually dropped.⁴

La Barre’s interview with Bruchlos revealed a trade with a healthy profit margin. He was buying his peyote from Laredo at $8 per hundred buttons and selling them processed for around five times that amount. Had he sold all his stock, he would have cleared between $2,000 and $5,000. Bruchlos closed the Dollar Sign and opened another store nearby, which was by now one of several in lower Manhattan selling dried or powdered buttons. At the San Remo, Allen Ginsberg’s Greenwich Village haunt, the writer Terry Southern recalled that ‘people started chopping them up and eating them like figs’.5

‘Peyote and mescaline,’ according to La Barre, ‘were now becoming well known to every practising bohemian and beatnik.’⁶ They were equally familiar on the west coast, especially in North Beach boho circles where they were consumed and traded alongside marijuana, Benzedrine and heroin. In 1958 the underground filmmaker Lawrence Jordan produced a short piece, Triptych in Four Parts, that spliced images of the bearded and barefoot North Beach artist John Reed with dazzling colour footage of peyoteros harvesting, cutting and drying hundreds of buttons under azure skies in the Laredo cactus gardens. Further south in the jazz clubs and burlesque joints of Hollywood, peyote buttons from Exotic Gardens in El Paso circulated as the hipster comedian Lord Buckley entertained the likes of Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey and Henry Miller with his routine about the Church of the Living Swing, where the Sacrament was mescaline.⁷

In marked contrast to the bohemians of the 1920s, who had regarded Indian peyote use as inauthentic and degenerate, for those of the 1960s it was a powerful attractor towards Native American culture and spirituality. At the solar eclipse in February 1962 a group of North Beach and Big Sur bohemians including Stewart Brand and Peter Coyote convened at Mount Tamalpais in Marin County for what was perhaps the first non-Indian peyote ceremony in the US since Mabel Dodge’s catastrophic salon in 1916. Brand, who later founded the Whole Earth Catalog, was among the first of the new generation to seek out Native American Church groups and participate in peyote meetings. By 1965 going ‘up the cactus trail’ was an established route for spiritual seekers.⁸ In Colorado, the activist Linda Pedro recalled first hearing about peyote from fellow beatniks on the University of Colorado’s Denver campus in 1963, and almost immediately being given three buttons by a stranger as he walked past her. Struck by the synchronicity, she set up a peyote altar in her room and was promptly presented by another friend with a copy of Frank Waters’ The Man Who Killed the Deer. Peyote ‘seemed to be coming from everywhere at once’. She seized the moment and moved to Santa Fe, where she attended her first peyote ceremony in an apartment on East Alameda Street in 1965.9

In Texas, the home state of the peyote gardens, the connection with the local beatnik culture was made as early as 1960. In the Ghetto club in Austin, where marijuana circulated discreetly, peyote was introduced by University of Texas anthropology students to a crowd who were taught to consume it seriously in improvised NAC-style rituals. They were overseen by sober ‘babysitters’ and the bitter cactus was powdered and packed in gel caps to reduce nausea. Tommy Hall, soon to become a core member of the 13th Floor Elevators, made trips to Hudson’s cactus farm outside Laredo to procure supplies, and used his chemistry background to perform rough extractions of mescaline. These home-made preparations, along with the morning glory milkshakes he also experimented with, were abandoned in 1965 when the first vials of blue liquid LSD arrived in town.

Around the same time the anthropology student John Kimmey, who had encountered peyote while travelling in Mexico and developed his own spiritual ceremony around it, took peyote with a group of friends in a cave at Pyramid Lake, Nevada. During the ceremony he heard the word ‘Taos’ spoken clearly inside his head. Kimmey and his fellow travellers moved to the environs of Taos in 1965 and established a commune they called New Buffalo, which aimed to live in harmony with the land as the continent’s original inhabitants had.¹⁰ Few of the residents of Taos pueblo were prepared to cooperate with them, but one, Little Jimmy Gomez, visited and taught them how to build traditionally in adobe. Gomez was from a peyotist family and his father had once had a vision that the peyote religion would pass from Indians to whites in generations to come. He presided over ceremonies at New Buffalo, initiating the participants into the ritual uses of fire, staff, drum, rattle and feathers and holding the circle together despite the nausea and vomiting of his novice congregation.

New Buffalo achieved immortality through its inclusion in Easy Rider (1969), and is among the few communes from that era that survives today as a self-sufficient agricultural community. By the early 1970s most had collapsed in the face of the harsh high desert conditions and increasing tensions with the Taos pueblo, which were mirrored across the pueblos and reservations of the Southwest. The new arrivals often assumed incorrectly that all Indians were peyotists, which made them insensitive to the delicate issues it raised between tribes, families, generations and the Indian and Hispanic communities. They also tended to assume that peyotists approved of marijuana and alcohol; in fact most NAC members were firmly opposed to them. They failed to respect Indian land, or to appreciate many Native Americans’ patriotic support of army veterans and the Vietnam War. The huge popularity of Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi led to an invasion of the Hopi reservation by free spirits who found a strict and ascetic caste of elders appalled at the prospect of their younger generation becoming hippies.

After the release of Easy Rider, its director and star Dennis Hopper bought Mabel Dodge Luhan’s now-crumbling adobe house and filled it with fine contemporary art just as its architect had. He nicknamed it ‘the Mud Palace’ and famously rode his Harley across its roof. An apocryphal tale circulated among his visitors that D.H. Lawrence had once taken peyote there, thrown off all his clothes and had to be chained up in the courtyard, howling like a coyote.

The 1960s were a period of rapid growth for the Native American Church, which by some estimates doubled its membership during the decade. The Indian activist Vine Deloria Jr recalled growing up on the Oglala Lakota reservation of Pine Ridge, South Dakota, close by Wounded Knee, where during the post-war years the NAC was no more than a distant and notorious rumour. By the late sixties he estimated that around 40 per cent of his people had become members of the church. ‘It appears to be the religion of the future among the Indian people,’ he wrote at the end of the decade.11 The white Christianity of the missionaries was dying; it failed to satisfy the Indian appetite for religion or to make sense of Indian society, and allied itself too uncritically with the dominant culture’s money-worship and racial discrimination. The circumscribed Christian notion of ‘giving’ was much less generous than true Indian ‘sharing’, the spirit of mutualism nurtured by the NAC.

By 1970, however, the American counterculture’s understanding of peyote was being shaped by a quite different narrative. Ten years previously, in 1960 (so the story went), Carlos Castaneda, a young UCLA anthropology student, was waiting for a Greyhound bus in the Sonoran Desert on the Arizona–Mexico border when his local guide directed his attention to ‘a white-haired old Indian’ who was ‘very knowledgeable about plants, especially peyote’.12 Castaneda introduced himself to the old man, Don Juan, and asked if he would teach him. In August of the following year he visited Don Juan in his house on the Arizona side of the border. In the presence of five other Indian men, but without any ceremony, Castaneda was given seven dried buttons, or mescalitos, from a coffee jar. He chewed them down, washing the bitterness away with tequila, and soon noticed that ‘my vision had diminished to a circular area in front of my eyes’. In this circle a black dog appeared and came to drink from a pan of water; as Castaneda watched, the dog became a being of radiant light. He knelt to share the water and as he drank ‘I saw the fluid running through my veins setting up hues of red and yellow and green . . . I was all aglow. I drank until the fluid went out of my body through each pore and projected out like fibers of silk, and I too acquired a long, lustrous, iridescent mane. I looked at the dog and his mane was like mine.’ Castaneda and the dog wrestled and played together for hours, and by the time he returned to consciousness ‘I had forgotten I was a man!’¹³

When Castaneda asked Don Juan the next morning whether all this had really happened, the old man replied sternly, ‘Goddammit! It was not a dog!’¹⁴ Nor would he permit Castaneda to use the word peyote: he insisted on referring to the cactus as Mescalito, a person, and rebuffed his student’s attempts to talk about him directly. In his book Castaneda described how, over a sequence of four encounters, he learned to use peyote to enter the world of the nagual, or shaman, in which the rules of everyday reality no longer applied. On a night-time excursion to the desert he encountered Mescalito face to face for the first time, as a human figure with green, warty skin like a peyote and a hole in his hand through which scenes from Castaneda’s future life flashed. Mescalito turned away and ‘hopped like a cricket for perhaps fifty yards. He hopped again and again, and was gone.’15

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge was the blockbuster opening to a series of adventures that went on to sell over 25 million copies. Their success was not notably impacted by the procession of anthropologists who pointed out the absence of a peyote tradition among the Yaqui people, who lived to the west of its natural habitat;¹⁶ that much of the plant lore related by Castaneda, such as the smoking of dried hallucinogenic mushrooms, was unknown in any indigenous tradition;¹⁷ and that many of the stories he attributed to Don Juan had clear sources in the work of anthropologists such as Michael Harner, Peter Furst and Barabara Myerhoff. In 1976 the investigative journalist Richard de Mille published Castaneda’s Journey, a forensic analysis of the uncredited borrowings in the Don Juan stories, which concluded that Castaneda’s fieldwork and reportage was ‘a swindle, a sham, a masquerade, a spoof, a hoax, or what you will’.¹⁸

In his books, Castaneda sidestepped the question of where his teacher’s knowledge came from: ‘He never mentioned the place where he had acquired his knowledge, nor did he identify his teacher. In fact, Don Juan disclosed very little about his personal life.’¹⁹ He had travelled extensively, so Castaneda’s story went, and lived for extended periods in the centre and south of Mexico. His shamanism was eclectic and unique; or, as de Mille and other scholars concluded, he was a fictional repository for an assemblage of ethnographic accounts that spanned Mesoamerica, the Andes and the Amazon.

One of the major sources was the anthropological studies of the Huichol. De Mille documented thirty-seven passages in Castaneda’s books that appeared to be plagiarised from the work of Barbara Myerhoff and Peter Furst. It turned out that Castaneda had visited Myerhoff when she was staying with the Huichol, and she had introduced him to Ramón Maria Silva, who was, it seemed, a real-life model for Castaneda’s mysterious teacher. Nonetheless, Castaneda’s experiences with peyote had little connection to Huichol traditions. The anthropologist Jay Fikes, who spent several seasons living with the Huichol, learning their language and observing healing sessions and rituals, concluded that the main source for Castaneda’s Mescalito was ‘Jiminy Cricket, Walt Disney’s cartoon character’.20

Fikes tracked the tangled lines of influence back to UCLA’s anthropology department, where Castaneda had studied and won a doctoral degree on the basis of what subsequently became his first book. This was where Myerhoff and Furst were based, along with other scholars and champions of shamanism such as Carlo Ginzburg and Marija Gimbutas. Fikes and Furst traded accusations of academic fraud and persecution that escalated to a series of lawsuits.²¹ In Mexico, meanwhile, the effect of Castaneda’s books was to turn the Huichol into poster children for the psychedelic counterculture. Fikes was distressed by the young tourists who were now descending on them from the United States and beyond, demanding peyote and showing little respect for their traditions. Castaneda’s first wife Margaret claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration, that her husband’s books had ‘led millions of young people’ to seek shamanic powers ‘with the aid of mescaline and peyote’.²²

After his academic exposure, Castaneda’s writings gradually disappeared from the footnotes and bibliographies of his UCLA teachers, though some continued to defend him against the debunkers. When Richard de Mille asked Myerhoff whether ‘the fact that the Don Juan books were a transparent fraud [didn’t] invalidate the model’, she replied, ‘No, it doesn’t . . . the message is needed.’²³ In appropriating aspects of Don Juan’s peyote shamanism from Ramón and the Huichol, Castaneda was popularising a new sensibility that took indigenous beliefs seriously. Douglas Sharon, the first anthropologist to immerse himself in Peru’s San Pedro healing traditions and a UCLA acquaintance of Castaneda’s, concurred: ‘In spite of the fact that his work may be fiction, the approach he was taking – validating the native point of view – was badly needed in anthropology.’24 Whether fact or fantasy, his books articulated an indigenous perspective in which ‘power plants’ were not simply intoxicants but spiritual allies with which skilled users could develop a deep and reciprocal relationship.

The popularity of Castaneda’s work did not depend on the imprimatur of the academy; in many ways, quite the opposite. Like Huxley’s, his sensational success owed as much to timing as to content. He wrote for a generation that was discovering psychedelics for itself, and offered them a charter stitched from a variety of indigenous traditions that, precisely because it had no actual real-life referent, could be freely appropriated. He plagiarised but also showcased for non-academic readers the work of a new generation of anthropologists who were immersing themselves in practices that their seniors had typically dismissed as inebriation, self-poisoning or cultural decadence.

Castaneda also provided a corrective to the dominant rhetoric of the psychedelic sixties, which prophets of LSD such as Timothy Leary had presented as a radical form of modernity, even a new stage in human evolution. He told an alternative story in which psychedelics had long been part of cultures from which the modern west had much to learn. His peyote visions bore little resemblance to any described before or since, but they worked perfectly as narrative devices for shifting the protagonist and the reader into the world of the nagual. He presides in spirit over today’s mass-cultural phenomenon of the ayahuasca journey, which has for better or worse transformed both tourism and shamanism in the Amazon. Far more than peyote, the DMT-rich ayahuasca potion reliably generates the kind of hallucinatory spirit encounters that Castaneda attributed to Mescalito.

During the sixties mescaline made a parallel journey into the emerging counterculture, not from the Mexican desert but from the laboratory. In the early years of the decade it was largely replaced in clinical research by LSD and psilocybin, which Albert Hofmann had isolated from Mexican mushrooms in 1958 and synthesised in 1959, and which Sandoz subsequently marketed under the name Indocybin. Mescaline still had some research uses, particularly in trials that aimed to compare the effects of a range of psychoactive drugs. These included CIA-funded trials under the MK-ULTRA programme, such as those begun in 1957 by Dr Paul Hoch of the US Army Chemical Corps to test his theory that mescaline and LSD were essentially ‘anxiety-producing drugs’ that might be used to instil fear in a target population. Hoch used mescaline to induce paranoia and recorded that ‘the mental picture was that of a typical schizophrenic psychosis while the drug influence lasted’. He proceeded to combine mescaline with electroshock treatment, and found that ‘it did not influence the clinical symptoms at all’.25

Hoch’s studies were funded by the Josiah Macy Foundation, a medical research body with close links at that time to the CIA. In 1959 it organised a conference on LSD research that was attended by the clinical pharmacologist Leo Hollister, a sceptic of the psychotomimetic model that viewed the effects of psychedelics as model psychoses. Hollister argued that double-blind controls were needed in which these drugs were administered to ‘normal’ subjects alongside schizophrenic patients, and he received funds indirectly from the CIA to conduct trials at his place of work, the Veterans Affairs Hospital at Menlo Park near the university campus in Stanford, California. He acquired a battery of psychoactive drugs including LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and deliriants such as Ditran derived from chemical warfare agents, and advertised for volunteers with good physical and mental health. He offered compensation of $25 for the first session and up to $75 for subjects prepared to stay the course. The trials took place in the hospital, in small sanitised rooms with wired-glass windows, during which the volunteers were put through tests for motor skills, cognition and memory. Among them was an aspiring writer named Ken Kesey.

Kesey’s first session, with a little blue pill that turned out to be Sandoz LSD, was a revelation. He was already familiar with marijuana and Benzedrine, but this was of a different order: it seemed ‘to give you more observation and insight, and it [made] you question things you [didn’t] ordinarily question’.26 He continued with the trial and, having established where the research chemicals were kept, took a job as janitor in the hospital, giving him illicit but easy access to them. He worked night shifts, during one of which he took a huge dose of mescaline and ‘managed the night by mopping fervently whenever the nurse arrived so she couldn’t see my twelve-gauge pupils’.²⁷ He spent long hours with the psychiatric patients, during which he conceived the notion that the hospital was a microcosm of the systems of power and control that operated in society at large, and he began to sketch out what would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He also discovered that peyote buttons could be ordered from Smith’s Cactus Ranch in Laredo, the same wholesaler that was supplying Barron Bruchlos in New York. During one hospital stint on eight buttons, the character of Chief Bromden, the huge, docile Native American patient, ‘just appeared’ in his mind: a narrator who stood outside the drama of sanity and madness in which all the other characters were enmeshed.²⁸

‘We need a messiah to tell the people,’ Kesey announced, and he was one of several charismatic figures who over the next few years made it their mission to introduce psychedelics to the culture at large.²⁹ None of these figures, however, made mescaline their drug of choice. For Kesey and his anarchic cohort the Merry Pranksters, LSD became the sacrament; when their scene expanded to a scale that demanded its own supply, the underground savant Augustus Owsley Stanley III taught himself how to synthesise it in his kitchen, working backwards from a little blue Sandoz pill. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert began their psychedelic experiments with the Mexican mushroom and switched to its Sandoz-supplied active ingredient for their Harvard Psilocybin Project of 1961–63, before turning their researches and proselytising energies to LSD. Alan Watts listed mescaline along with psilocybin, LSD and DMT as a stimulus to the expanded consciousness he described in The Joyous Cosmology (1962), but he never described his experiences with it.30 Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1965) unfolds with no mention of mescaline at all.

By the early sixties chemical suppliers were subjecting orders of all psychedelics to closer scrutiny, and permission for psychedelic research studies became harder to obtain. In 1962 the Kefauver–Harris Amendment to the codes of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), passed in the wake of the Thalidomide tragedy, tightened the rules further by mandating that new drugs had to be medically approved for their intended use, and a subsequent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association informed its members that any drug which altered ‘mental and emotional equilibrium’ should be available only ‘under medical control’.³¹ In the new climate, the high potency of LSD made it the most obvious choice among the psychedelics for clinical research, with the fewest ‘side effects’ – meaning, in this context, anything not related to cognitive function. Mescaline’s physicality, large dosage and long duration all counted against it. Among the psychedelic vanguard, mescaline’s physical effects (‘body load’) also made it second-favourite to LSD, for which there were a growing number of non-medical sources.

Those who specifically sought out mescaline after 1960 did so largely as a result of reading The Doors of Perception. The physician Andrew Weil, as a Harvard freshman in 1961, was inspired by reading Huxley to approach the psychology lecturer Timothy Leary, who told Weil he wasn’t permitted to recruit undergraduate volunteers for his psilocybin research but recommended to him that mescaline might be the easiest psychedelic agent to get hold of. ‘It took only two months and moderate ingenuity,’ Weil recalled, to obtain a supply from a US chemical research company, after which he formed a group with seven other undergraduates to investigate and report carefully on its effects.32 Although ‘insights were gained that have had lasting importance’ he found mescaline overall to be unreliable. Most sessions produced ‘nothing more than intensifications of pre-existing moods with prominent periods of euphoria’, and many of the effects were undesirable: ‘the prolonged wakefulness, for example, and the strong stimulation of the central nervous system with resultant dilated eyes, cold extremities, and stomach butterflies’.³³ In 1964 he had a much more powerful experience with psilocybin, and later found LSD to be the most rewarding psychedelic for his researches.

Experimenters had always found it impossible to separate out mescaline’s peculiar combination of mental, physical, visual, psychic and emotional effects, and by the sixties they no longer needed to: LSD and psilocybin could deliver similar alterations in consciousness with significantly less of what were now conceived as ‘side effects’ or ‘residue’. After 1963, however, legal and commercial controls tightened around all three. In the wake of Leary’s expulsion from Harvard, Sandoz withdrew LSD and psilocybin from sale in the US except for orders where specific clearance had been given by the FDA. Concerns about the non-medical ‘abuse’ of psychedelics dovetailed with growing evidence, particularly from trials on US military subjects, that LSD carried both acute and long-term risks of serious mental illness such as psychosis and depression.³⁴

In 1965 mescaline and LSD were prohibited by the US Drug Abuse Control Amendments for everything but government-approved research, and from this point on clinical research with mescaline became vanishingly rare. One of the few later examples was at Freiburg medical school in Germany, where in the mid-1980s the remainder of Kurt Beringer’s sixty-year-old vials of Merck mescaline were brought to light. They were used in a small-scale trial that aimed to validate Beringer’s concept of ‘mescal psychosis’ by elucidating, once again, the commonalities between its effects and the symptoms of psychotic disorders.³⁵ The study proved, if nothing else, that properly stored mescaline can remain viable for a lifetime.

Mescaline, alongside LSD and psilocybin, was placed under Schedule 1 of the US Controlled Substances Act (high potential for abuse and no recognised medical application) in 1970, and prohibited internationally under the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971. By that time it had largely vanished from the streets just as it had from the laboratory and the clinic. The economics of the illicit market overwhelmingly favoured LSD: the process of synthesising the two compounds was comparable in cost and risk, but the rewards of LSD were thousands of times greater. At a standard dose of around 250 to 400mg, a gram of mescaline amounts to around three doses; a gram of LSD can provide up to thirty thousand.

Mescaline retained a powerful mystique, however, and underground chemists not motivated by financial return produced it occasionally in small batches for the connoisseur market. Various new syntheses had been developed since Ernst Späth’s original discovery: the one most commonly deployed was a seven-step process first published by Makepeace Tsao in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1951 which begins with gallic acid, a relatively accessible precursor used in industrial pharmacy.36 But in an illicit market it was anyone’s guess what was actually in the pills or powders: anything could command a high price from those who believed it to be mescaline. It was sometimes sold to the unwary in the microdot or blotter formats used for microgram doses of LSD, which are incapable of holding anything like a full dose of mescaline. Even when the size of pill or quantity of powder was plausible, ‘mescaline’ might be anything from LSD to methamphetamine, PCP (‘angel dust’) or the synthetic phenethylamine known as DOM or STP. Microgram Journal, the bulletin of street drugs and laboratory analysis circulated by the US Bureau of Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs in the 1960s, lists mescaline in its expanding inventory of target drugs and makes reference to the 1951 Tsao synthesis, but includes no reports of verified street purchases or seizures.37

A handful of rock legends from the era invoke mescaline: in his memoir Arthur Lee recalls taking it along with his band, Love, and Jimi Hendrix during an all-night session at Olympic Studios in London in 1970, and the Grateful Dead’s ‘mescaline show’ at Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1978 is still fondly recalled.³⁸ But the trip from this era that redefined mescaline for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond was Hunter S. Thompson’s white-knuckle ride in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). Thompson arrives at his Vegas hotel already badly twisted on cocaine and LSD, together with his companion, a ‘Samoan attorney’, who is gibbering ‘I must have some drugs! What have you done with the mescaline?’³⁹ The pair dig some ‘pellets’ (pills? rolled-up peyote buttons?) out of their medical bag and are driving down Main Street when ‘the fiendish cactus juice took over, plunging me into a sub-human funk’.⁴⁰

The mescaline is temporarily subsumed in the polydrug frenzy; they arrive at a bikers’ gun club and the madness spools on. Some while later, in the Circus-Circus casino, Thompson feels the gears cranking up – ‘good mescaline comes on slow’ – to a pitch of ‘that fearful intensity that comes at the peak of a mescaline seizure’.⁴¹ There is no further mention of the drug through the chaos that follows, which concludes many hours later with the show-stopping scene of his attorney, now with ‘a head full of acid and the sharpest knife I’ve ever seen’,⁴² demanding that Thompson throw the hotel radio into his bath at the moment when Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ peaks.

The roots of Fear and Loathing’s mescaline trip are exposed in Thompson’s 1969 article ‘First Visit with Mescalito’,⁴³ a more single-minded account of his first mescaline experience and, with hindsight, a dry run for his masterpiece. Its title was a riposte to Castaneda’s recently published first book, which he had just read: ‘Very weird; that old man really fucked the kid around, eh? . . . a Yaqui way of publicity. Fuck it; I’m tired of all that bullshit.’44 Thompson’s experiment took place before dawn in a hotel on Sunset Strip, after several days and nights awake on Dexedrine, when he found himself with a flight to catch to Denver and nothing in his drugs bottle but ‘a big spansule [time-release capsule] of mescaline and “speed”’. Even for this street pharmacologist par excellence, the pill was something of a mystery – ‘I don’t know the ratio of the mixture, or what kind of speed is in there with the mescaline’⁴⁵ – and it seems odd that a substance as rare and expensive as mescaline should have been mixed with a cheap and unspecified amphetamine. But, whatever its chemistry, the psychedelic overdrive is captured in persuasive and excruciating detail. Thompson’s typewriter clatters at top speed as ‘the keys sparkle, glitter with highlights’ and the typist finds himself ‘buzzing all over . . . the little red indicator that moves along with the ball on this typewriter now appears to be made of arterial blood. It throbs and jumps along like a living thing.’

As dawn breaks and harsh reality intrudes, elements of the Fear and Loathing scenario snap into place. Oscar Acosta, the prototype for the book’s ‘Samoan’ attorney,⁴⁶ is summoned on a rescue mission to supply beer and human cover as Thompson attempts to pack, check out of the hotel and make it to the airport. ‘White Rabbit’ even makes a cameo appearance as the stream of consciousness rushes on: ‘I seem to have leveled out, like after the first rush of acid. If this is as deep as it’s going to bore, I think we can make it to the plane, but I dread it. Getting in a steel tube and shot across the sky, strapped down . . .’ After a flight relayed in paranoid fragments – ‘warn the pilot – this plane feels very wormy at this altitude’ – Thompson comes down, still jangling and disconnected, on the prosaic but solid tarmac of Denver airport.⁴⁷

Fear and Loathing situated mescaline within an exotic pharmacopoeia, and by extension a streetwise drug culture that was leaving the utopian dreams of the sixties in its dust. The hippies were not going to save the world with their transcendental medication; mescaline was no longer the portal to Huxley’s transcendent ‘Mind at Large’ or Castaneda’s world of the nagual. It had become one among a ‘whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers’ that included everything from cocaine to ether and amyl nitrate, sheets of blotter acid to rum and tequila.48 In the process it scrambled the image of mescaline once more, in some respects returning it to the nineteenth century and the Wild West, where ‘mescal’ labelled a confused territory in which peyote, strong spirits and poison berries overlapped. ‘Fiendish cactus juice’ might be either mescaline or a mezcal spirit such as tequila: the two sat next to each other in the trunk of Thompson’s car (which ‘looked like a mobile police narcotics lab’).⁴⁹

Fear and Loathing was also the source of the urban legends around adrenochrome, Osmond, Smythies and Hoffer’s candidate for ‘M-substance’, a compound that would have passed from popular memory had it not been for the unforgettable narrative Thompson constructed around it in the chapter entitled ‘A Terrible Experience with Extremely Dangerous Drugs’. Thompson’s attorney horrifies him by announcing that ‘one of those Satanism freaks’ has gifted him a bottle of adrenochrome, a legendary substance that can only be obtained from ‘the adrenal glands from a living human body’. Thompson delicately dips a match head into the bottle. ‘That’s about right,’ his attorney nods, ‘that stuff makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer.’ It comes on ‘like a combination of mescaline and methedrine’: the spansule in the Sunset Strip hotel.⁵⁰ When Osmond and Hoffer announced that adrenochrome was the first psychoactive substance to be identified in the human body, they can hardly have imagined that this was how their discovery would be best remembered.

In the drug culture of the twenty-first century, mescaline has two faces: the sacred and the profane. The first is identified with peyote and the magical tales of Carlos Castaneda, the second with a legendary white crystal and the twisted exploits of Hunter S. Thompson. The two might be seen as the culminating points of two strands of western engagement that ran in parallel throughout the twentieth century: Castaneda as heir to the spiritual explorations of William James, Aleister Crowley, Frederick Smith and Aldous Huxley, and Thompson to the creative derangement of the senses pursued by Havelock Ellis, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Henri Michaux and William Burroughs. Both of their narratives are tangled webs of fact and fiction, and both have been further mythologised through an echo-chamber of references that extends across the mainstream of pop culture from The Matrix to The Simpsons.51

Mescaline itself has almost entirely vanished from the modern drug scene – or perhaps, one could argue, it has metamorphosed to become the beating heart of it. The most consequential mescaline trip of the sixties was, with hindsight, the one taken in April 1960 by Alexander Shulgin, a biochemist at Dow Chemical Company in California who had recently completed his postdoctoral studies in pharmacology at Berkeley. He had read Huxley and followed his footsteps back to Beringer and Rouhier, and was surprised by how little pharmacological work had been done on mescaline’s wider chemical family. When a psychologist offered him the chance to try it, he accepted eagerly, and the experience ‘unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life’. He was awoken to colour and visual detail as never before, and continually struck with novel insights, but ‘more than anything else, the world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child’. He found himself immersed in ‘a space wherein I had once roamed as an immortal explorer, and I was recalling everything that had been known authentically to me then, and which I had abandoned, then forgotten, with the coming of age’.⁵² He decided on the spot that if there were similar compounds as yet unknown, he would discover them.

Shulgin quickly established that there were only two known chemicals with a phenethylamine structure and effects that resembled those of mescaline, trimethoxyamphetamine (TMA) and methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA). During the early sixties he synthesised and sampled TMA, and experienced severe nausea and some slight changes in perception and mood. Bitten by the bug of discovery he turned his attention to the essential oils of nutmeg, which included the psychoactive compound myristicin and looked as if they could be tweaked to produce TMA- or MDA-like drugs. His first attempt yielded the previously unknown 3-methoxy-4,5-methylenedioxyamphetamine, or MMDA, which turned out to be ‘a truly fascinating compound. It did not have the bells and whistles, the drama of mescaline, but it was considerably more benign.’ Its effects lasted only a couple of hours as opposed to a gruelling ten or twelve, and the visuals it produced were ‘just on the verge of mescaline or psilocybin’.53 Another substituted phenethylamine, DOM (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine), turned out to be active at a much smaller dose than mescaline, around 4mg. (In 1967 Owsley manufactured a batch that was sold through his Bay Area networks under the name STP, supposedly an acronym for ‘Serenity, Tranquillity and Peace’. Its effects were anything but: a decimal point error, most unusual for the fastidious Owsley, had produced wildly over-strength tablets of 20mg that led to a wave of emergency hospital admissions.)

In 1961 Shulgin developed one of the first biodegradable pesticides, marketed by Dow as Zectran. It was hugely profitable and he was thereafter allowed great latitude in directing his own laboratory work, which he used to further his psychopharmacy research. In 1965 he synthesised an N-methylated version of MDA, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA, which had originally been patented by Merck in 1912 but never made available for research. When Shulgin tried it two years later he found it ‘unlike anything I had taken before. It was not a psychedelic in the visual or interpretative sense, but the lightness and warmth of the psychedelic was present and quite remarkable.’⁵⁴ He began taking it regularly, carrying a vial around with him and dosing himself at parties, where he referred to it as his ‘low-calorie martini’.⁵⁵ He shared it with friends, who found it euphoric and emotionally therapeutic, and he introduced it to a psychotherapist who discreetly used LSD and MDA with some of his clients. The therapist reported that it had unique potential for drug-assisted therapy, and MDMA spread rapidly through California’s psychotherapeutic community. It was, one psychiatrist pronounced, ‘penicillin for the soul’.56

By the early 1980s MDMA had made the transit, like LSD before it, from the clinic to the street. At this point still a legal substance, it circulated initially in the dance clubs of Texas, Chicago and New York. Its original marketeers named it ‘empathy’ to stress its open-hearted and euphoric effects, but the street name that took hold was ‘ecstasy’. It was, in many respects, mescaline tamed for the new chemical generation. Its physical effects still included a tendency to nausea at onset but the warm, tingling euphoria of mescaline’s spectrum predominated, and its duration was reduced to a manageable three or four hours. Its psychedelic effects were less disorientating and challenging than a large dose of mescaline, but not dissimilar to those produced by the lower doses of peyote and San Pedro used in their traditional contexts. It didn’t yield the brilliant visions prized by mescaline’s early experimenters, but rather what Shulgin called ‘a special magic’ that made the world sparkle and glow.⁵⁷

By nudging its physical symptoms in a milder and more pleasurable direction, MDMA turned what scientists and psychonauts alike had considered to be mescaline’s undesirable side effects into a delicious ‘body high’ of rushes, waves and tingles. It was a trip for the senses as well as the mind, and it reconfigured drug culture to its needs: expansive dance spaces in warehouses or open-air festivals, extended hypnotic beats and vibrant dayglo visuals. It evolved a ceremony that accommodated its sacrament in many of the ways that native peyote traditions had, using rhythmic movement to banish chills and nausea and intense group bonding to lift the spirits.

The 1990s were designated the ‘Decade of the Brain’ by President George H.W. Bush, a former director of Prozac manufacturers Eli Lilly, and the same discoveries in neurochemistry that flooded the pharmaceutical market with antidepressants also stimulated underground chemists to develop a galaxy of new stimulants and euphoriants. Shulgin, now working from his DEA-licensed laboratory in a shed behind his house, led the field. He synthesised, assayed and reported on some two hundred new psychedelic phenethylamines, many of which had properties that overlapped with one or another part of mescaline’s spectrum. MDMA was joined in the illicit marketplace by compounds such as 2C-B and 2C-T-758 that combined the tingling euphoria of ecstasy with the swirling visual patterning of mescaline. Before Shulgin’s death in 2014 he began exploring new ‘fly’ and ‘dragonfly’ structures, wing-like extensions on such molecules that created new and more potent variations on his already vast repertoire. Mescaline itself may have disappeared from both the laboratory and the street, but its progeny are everywhere and their future permutations potentially infinite.