Drug Free America

TIHKAL
- THE FINAL FRONTIER

Being a reasoned argument as to why our drug laws are inane and an affront to the intelligence of a well educated post-industrial society. If this really is the informational age then our systems are only as good as the information fed into them. Somebody better tell the truth.

We currently have a situation where our UK Home Secretary Jack Straw is justifying the current ludicrous Draconian measures against cannabis by claiming that of all heroin addicts interviewed over 90 percent had sampled cannabis first and that therefore cannabis is a gateway drug to heavy drug abuse. As a piece of philosophical reasoning it has all the intellectual thrust of a Telly Tubbies story line. You could on that basis state with a straight face that a black bird is a black, therefore all birds are black. Or lets try the Jack Straw line of intellectual philosophical reasoning? with other products i.e. over 90 percent of alcoholics when interviewed confirmed that their first pleasurable experience of liquid refreshment was mothers milk, Oh Jack , Oh my giddy aunt, hold the front page tell the tabloids to spread the word, mothers milk is a threat to the youth of our nation. Via our rigorous market research we have proved it to be a dangerous gateway drink. Lets us ban mothers milk and make women’s breasts illegal if they are found to be lactating this harmful product.

Or, when interviewed a 100 percent of cocaine abusers confirmed that their first introduction to the pleasures to be had by ingesting white crystal substances was via refined sugar found in children’s’ sweets. Oh my God let us ban Sherbet Fountains, shut down the nations tuck shops, bust Nestle or an 11 year old found to be carrying a bag of mint humbugs. Humbug indeed and foolish to the point of idiocy and yet these people set themselves up as authority figures to be respected, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together can comprehend the inherent weakness of the ‘gateway’ argument. Someone should point out politely out to Mr. Straw that his argument only works as an argument if over 90 percent of cannabis users go on to become heroin addicts. The plain truth is that THEY DON’T and never have done for the same reasons that those who enjoy a bottle of wine with a dinner party on a weekend do not go on to become full blown alcoholics who have need of a bottle of whisky for breakfast on a Monday morning. Not everyone has an addictive nature.

Those with addictive personalities or anti social tendencies have problems and those problems must be addressed. Outlawing all drugs is not the answer. Is it not obvious that you cannot legislate against consciousness? Residing under the same recreational drug umbrella as cannabis are another range of drugs; psychedelics like LSD and of course the now popular club land dance party essential, ecstasy. They too are outlawed and given distorted bad press, yet how anyone in their right mind can place MDMA in the same Class A drug category as a genuinely deadly and addictive drug like heroin is beyond belief. In the advanced guard of the pushing forward the final frontiers of human consciousness and championing the responsible use of both psychedelics and MDMA is chemist Alexander and therapist Ann Shulgin.

In 1991 the Shulgins’ book ‘Pihkal – a chemical love story’ was published. It was greeted by the authorities with outrage and many countries banned it. The reason? because since the early ’60s Shulgin has been responsible for refining a vast range of drugs including MDMA and this book contained within its pages instructions on how to make and administer 179 types of Ecstasy. It not only gave information on the dosage to take and the effects of the high they bestowed on the user, information Shulgin knew only too well as he tested all his new chemical formulas on himself. Shulgin first started to manufacture MDMA in the ’60s. It became a therapists tool to be administered to their patients to help create a feeling of an empathy thus helping those with psychiatric, emotional or marital problems to discuss their feelings and explore their psyche openly and without fear.

As MDMA at this point was legal it did not take long for it to filter onto the streets of America. Eventually it became known as Adam and became popular on the gay house music club scene of the early ’80s, particularly in Chicago and New York. When MDMA hit the UK it resulted in the ‘88 Summer of Love and the new forms of clubbing, techno music and partying it inspired. Ten pints of beer and a curry had less appeal once you had necked your first White Dove and felt the full warmth of your own humanity flow through your body like Holy Wine. Small wonder that the Internet now has hundreds of Websites devoted to the Shulgins and in many circles Alexander is hailed as the Godfather of Acid House.

Shulgin followed this tone with ‘Tihkal – the continuation’. Tihkal (pronounced teekal) stands for, typtamines I have known and loved. A typtamine is a naturally occurring hallucinogenic compound found in both animal and plant kingdoms and is an endogenous component of the brain. In short, this tome is a cornucopia of psychedelic drug recipes, that this genius chemist has refined. It should be added that as with the varieties of MDMA he tested all of these hallucinogenics on himself. This is not only the act of a true fearless altruistic martyr, and should put him in line for a Sainthood, but is also one hell of a groovy way to making a living. In short Tihkal is the New Testament for the next millennium and this is not hyperbole. These drugs have been lovingly created to help spiritual seekers attain states of cosmic enlightenment and offer the psychonaut access to God head visions that reside in the multi dimensional universe of our sub consciousness.

Many divine ’Tree of Knowledge?’ type plants have been gathered, analysed and refined into DMT, LSD, ketamine, mescaline, harmeline, ibogaine, DET, DOM, TMA, NMT,2C-T-8; the variety of natures gifts seems endless. The second half of Tihkal lists 55 different formula. These substances are a ’systems upgrade’ for the mind, they provide new programs and allow our biological computers to function in magical ways. They allow the user to access new the internal information banks and are therefore as important to humanities evolutionary process as nuclear power and computers. Steve Dixon interviewed California based, Alexander now 72, and his wife Ann, on their views on drug use for both recreational and spiritual/therapeutic reasons and the legislation that seeks to control and inhibit the use of conscious raising chemical formulae.

Dixon
- Though your research was aimed at therapy MDMA it soon became a street drug and was used for partying. Did it occur to you that this might happen?

Alexander
- I had no idea that this kind of thing would occur but I saw early on the property it had for dropping certain paranoia from social interaction and from in ones self which is why it had such extreme value in therapy.

Ann
- Psychotherapy we were aware of and thought that would be its major use.

Dixon
- Once it hit club land the early E’s like white doves became legendary. Many now claim that the E’s are no longer as strong or as pure as when they first tried them. Is this true?

Alexander
- We don’t know what it is that people are taking in the UK as it’s illegality makes it impossible to have any real quality control but it is important to realise that the magic does not persist. After the first few times you have used it you build up a reflective condition, in as much as it will remind you of how the first time felt but you will not respond to the drug the seventh time as you do the first. The magic will however always be there for the new user.

Dixon
- How does the dosage given to therapy patients compare to street Ecstasy tablets?

Alexander
- For patients it is 120 milligrams but again its illegality has driven it underground so there is no longer the sort of professional supervision or education needed to ensure purity and the correct dosage levels. People now take multiple doses, and this drives the user more away from the subtlety of the magical properties.

Dixon
- So more is not always better?

Alexander
- No, the correct dosage is important for any type of medicine.

Dixon
- I should also point out that UK aggressive party types will perhaps also be taking combinations of speed, cocaine, poppers, alcohol, grass and acid along with their E. Nights out become a cocktail of highs.

Ann
- Do these people know if they are getting pure MDMA?

Dixon
- No

Ann – Sounds like a mess, they are not getting a pure, clean dose of anything.

Alexander
- This is the sad part of illegality against such a material, it becomes a polypharmic situation. Very often stimulants are added to street E. Not only speed but also intoxicants from the GHB (gamma hydrosy butyrate) world so if you have a limited amount of E you may want to spike it to give it more pep. GHB is very much in right now.

Dixon
- So is E physically dangerous, brain damaging or habit forming?

Alexander
- I have seen in British medical literature that there is a drive to lay the blame for many dangers on E. It is being made a scape goat of the drug information world. Yet there has been a great number of studies to find neurological damage, to find negative aspects to reinforce the prohibition of the drug yet it has no track record of neurological damage in man and given the large volume of usage in the UK this surely tests for its intrinsic safety.

Dixon
- The situation seems to parallel what happened to alcohol in the ’20s prohibition. Once booze became illegal the gangsters moved in attracted by the high profits, manufacturing was no longer controlled and drinking back street hooch made illegally lead to drinkers going blind yet this is not a problem now it has been decriminalised.

Alexander -
MDMA’s main hazard is that it is illegal, the pharmacological consequences of taking it are trivial.

Dixon – How does it compare with alcohol?

Alexander
- Well alcohol has a proven track record of negatives. Obviously driving on alcohol or E would be seriously condemned. But the difficulty with alcohol is that it is physically debilitating, there is a price to pay long term with alcohol which has not been demonstrated with E. On the bases of public health alcohol is far more damaging.

Ann - In all cases the more education, real education you make available to people the more carefully they are going to use these substances. What is required is real education . What is so called drug education in the USA is in fact propaganda, the over riding message is just say no, don’t use it, it is wrong, it will lead to evil and death. This is not education and the people who are giving out the propaganda have never tired the drug and are actually very ignorant about E, so how can that possibly be called education? I very firmly believe that what is important is to get out the facts and let the user evaluate those facts and choose whether or not to use drugs. Also it is time to stop lumping MDMA with cocaine and heroin . Psychoactive drugs, psychedelics and MDMA are not addictive yet they are put together with genuinely harmful drugs like heroin and cocaine. This disinformation results in college kids trying marijuana, realising that they have survived then develop the attitude that anything the government says about drugs must be false and then assume that the genuinely hard drugs like heroin and crack are safe and this is the big damage.

Dixon
- As it is obviously impossible to legislate against consciousness why do governments and authority figures in law, the teaching professions and the Church authorities have a fear of unlocking the inner self and exploring their spirituality? One might have hoped that the Church in particular would welcome a material that could put one in direct touch with the spirit world, bring about visions of Heaven and angels. Demonstrating in a practical way that Heaven resides inside our head and not in a never never land above the clouds presided over by an old man with a long white beard seems to resolves a lot of intellectual/philosophical problems particularly in explaining how the original visionaries, Jesus included, received their inner knowledge. Surely it doesn’t take a genius to understand that if Jesus wandered in the desert for forty days and forty nights and if the only thing around to eat would be cacti like peyote which is full of psychedelic drugs similar in effect to LSD that is hardly surprising that he return claiming to be the son of God and to have direct knowledge of Heaven. Jesus’ message that we are all Gods children and we can all attain eternal life is true once you realise that Godhead consciousness resides within and not something that we attain after we die. Why does the Church fear this knowledge?

Ann
- Most of the people who go into working in enforcement agencies and are attracted to positions that gives them authority over others usually come from social backgrounds where investigation of your own psyche and dreams is very much discouraged. Therefore these people tend to develop an unconscious fear of the deeper paths of their own psyche and unconsciously believe that at the bottom of their souls resides an out of control monster, what C G Jung called ‘the Shadow’ and they project the fear of what is at the bottom of their own psyche to the population at large. As they are terrified at what is at the core of themselves they develop a horror of any drugs that can open up their unconscious mind. In old world maps the unknown territories were marked with the phrase ‘here there be dragons’. People believed if they went far enough they would fall off the edge of the world. These fears become myths passed on as facts. There is nothing to fear.

Alexander -
The general Calvinistic denial of having fun and of extreme paternalism comes over, for example if you look back at the records there were efforts in the area of painkiller opiates to remove the side effects. The side effects were the pleasure. This is industrial paternalism. The Church like politicians survive by you giving your power to them. If you don’t give your power away you are a more complete person. Spiritual awareness undermines the power of the intermediary professional, the priest .

Dixon
- Where do you two plan to celebrate the arrival of the next millennium?

Alexander
- Busy writing the third book which will be my research on the psychoactive cacti world. Some have medical properties, some give spiritual experiences, some give a sparkling effect to the visuals. These cacti are to be found in North and South Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina , the Amazon and have been used by strange cultures throughout the New World. I know of several active species which are relatively unexplored chemically. A lot of this work was done many years ago, but has lain fallow with the immediate attention being directed to the phenethylamines (E) and the tryptamines (hallucinogenics). The next book will on isoquinolines. I am proposing to name it Quihkal for Isoquinolines I have known and loved, but Ann is giving me a bad time over it! We shall see. I am going to take them into the lab, take them apart and find out what is in them.

Dixon
- Will you be able to synthesis new psychedelic drugs from this research?

Alexander
- It would be impossible to avoid doing that. (Much laughter from the interviewer)

Dixon
- Can you please send me some samples when they are ready? (much laughter from the interviewees.).

Alexander
- In a couple of years. The book should be finished in three or four years time. It is remarkable how little work has been done on anything but the peyote. These plants open the doors to the human mind and human visions.

Ann
- You have to question why there is such an availability of these psycho active cacti and mushrooms and what a marvelous symbiotic relationship they have with humanity.

Alexander
- The Bible tells of manna that springs up out of nowhere after the rains. This is a mushroom.

Ann
- But you must pick with care, you must know your mushrooms. like all areas of psychedelic research and use it is knowledge and real information that will allow us to control drugs, not prohibition.

Conclusion

It is very easy to become evangelical about these wonderful discoveries as it resolves so many problems concerning the origins of world religions which are all rooted in the visionary experiences of their prophets, this includes Christianity. These visionary states of consciousness are exactly the states that the Shulgins enter, document and research with secular compassion. Jesus was a peasant who could only tell of his visions whereas Alexander creates them for everyone to experience. Tihkal is not cant dogma but natural science, it works as anyone who has checked for the power of a good LSD trip or a strong MDMA hit.

In chapter 25 of Tihka, Shulgin draws parallels between how psychedelic drug users are categorised as irresponsible criminals and how Galileo was imprisoned by a Catholic Church Inquisition for trying to teach that the world was not flat but round. Galileo had arrived at this conclusion with the aid of a looking glass, a telescope which extended his vision . The Catholic Cardinals refused to actually look down the telescope as they considered Galileo’s work to be heresy, the work of the Devil. His revelations about the physical layout of the Heavens did not fit neatly into the Churches view that taught how God had placed humanity at the centre of the Universe with Heaven above and Hell below. It took four centuries for the Church to admit that they were wrong and that the Earth revolved around the Sun. How long will be be before the authorities admit that we exist in a multiverse of alternative realities and that psychedelic drugs help us access them and let us explore the Final Froniter within? One would have hoped that by the year 2000 things might have changed but they have not.
While the Shulgins and researchers like them clearly demonstrate that our consciousness exist in a multi verse of alternative realities, people like Jack Straw want to go on believing that everything is one dimensional, that our internal world is flat and refuse to look down the chemical telescope so they can preserve a narrow vision. To help maintain their world view they outlaw any substance that can disturb their cozy, archaic views. They then brand the users of such substances as criminals and bring the full force of the law down on them.

We are now reaching the end of one of the most barbaric centuries so far in human history that has been witness to attempts of genocide that involved passive civilians, the old, women and young child who were fed into industrial systems like concentration camps. They were then butchered like chickens in a factory farm. Recent television interviews with Second World War German soldiers who daily worked in the Nazi Death Camps have shown them admitting that they shot children in the head at point blank range or forced people into gas chambers. They also confirmed that they were given extra rations of beer and vodka to help numb their sensibilities and the finer human emotions like compassion, empathy and love while they carried out their unbelievably inhuman work.
It would be hard to imagine some one firing a bullet into the face of a child while under the influence of MDMA. This fact alone must make this substance worth serious consideration as a tool of enlightenment. Barbarian dictators like Pol Pot still walk this planet, a sacred nation like Tibet that has existed in peace for generations is currently being raped and destroyed by the Chinese. If these facts don’t disturb you, then they should. Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung who are directly responsible for the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and the Chinese who sanctioned the invasion of Tibet have one thing in common. They use fear, torture, and violence against their fellow man and woman to suppress anyone who hold beliefs different to theirs. They persecute free thinking intellectuals who can show them up for what they really are, pure evil. IGNORANCE IS A LUXURY HUMANITY CAN NO LONGER AFFORD.
Any drug that can help us expand our consciousness, bestow wisdom and empathy to help us to relate to and understand our fellow man and woman must be taken seriously and must not swept under the carpet in some spurious ‘Drugs War’ campaign. Education and open debate is how we can learn to control drugs. Yet witch hunts and persecution still exists in the free West and is being carried out by puritans who have declared a ‘War on Drugs’, the good as well as the bad. This is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. These people have a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick. Surely they must understand by now that legislating against the right to explore our inner self is an infringement on a basic human liberty that is our birth right. Once upon a time the puritans told young men that if they masturbated and explored their own body and sexuality that they would go blind!!! Now the puritans spread fear and misunderstanding to those who want to touch their inner self. These narrow mind set people are trying to keep us in the Dark Ages of spiritual development when we should be free to go flying over Heaven if we wish.
The Shulgins are the light at the centre of the universe. Let them illuminate you.

Steve Dixon