Mike Jay Interview on Mescaline with Kinokuniya New York.
“A Global History of the First Psychedelic…”
Author & Cultural Historian Mike Jay offers his extensive knowledge on the hot topic of psychedelics. Specifically, Mescaline, better known as the psychoactive alkaloid present in the popular plant peyote received the focus of this beautifully written book about the history and culture behind it.
Interview Summary:
Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history. His books on the history of drugs include High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture and The Atmosphere of Heaven. He writes regularly for The London Review of Books including readings on Madness and Revolution, Memory, and Hallucinations. Jay also writes for The Wall Street Journal and The Literary Review including a piece on Philip K Dick. He writes a collection of essays called Stranger Than Fiction, Forgotten Aspects of History, A Fascinating Treatise, This Way Madness Lies, and many more.
Interviewer Rafael Ruiz asks Mike Jay about whether there is positive or negative potential on the recent obsession with psychedelics:
I think there's great potential in it. There are dangers in this medical and clinical focus. I think psychedelics don’t really fit into that way of doing things very well, but there are indigenous traditions of healing with psychedelics [that] go back thousands of years and I think a lot of people who use psychedelics, you know, in this sort of illicit market… I think a lot of recreational [drugs are] probably therapeutic either in terms of intentional healing or sort of broader ideas of well-being.
Ruiz moves on to question Jay about the Native American or indigenous people of America’s exploration and history with Mescaline:
Mescaline is curiously only found in nature in cacti and in two particular cacti which are very very different from each other. One is the San Pedro cactus as it's called or the “huachuma” as it's known in the Andes and that's still used in healing and divination ceremonies today. The other one is the peyote cactus… probably more familiar… which grows in Mexico and a little bit across the border in Texas. That was the conduit from, you know, between indigenous culture and sort of modern western scientific exploration and that's a fascinating story that I focus on in the book through two parallel stories. One of an ethnographer from the Smithsonian Institution called James Mooney who was the first white man to participate in a peyote ceremony, and also from Juana Parker who was the chief of the Comanches.. These two figures came together in Oklahoma in the 1890s and Juana Parker sold James Mooney a big bag of dried peyote buttons which he took back to Washington, and that kicked off, you know, the first scientific exploration of psychedelics and those were the peyote buttons that people like William James (American philosopher) ended up taking so it's a fascinating sort of cross-cultural narrative right there that's actually really fascinating.
Kinokuniya Ariel Valdez joined the conversation as a fan of Mike Jay’s work.
Valdez mentions the overemphasis of using psychedelics in medicine:
Well, I’m with you Ariel. There are two kinds of schools of thought about this. A lot of the people who've been, you know, trying to make psychedelics acceptable for a long time have pushed the medicalization model because they say, you know, it's like with marijuana, you go there first and then you answer a lot of the questions and deal with a lot of the problems and then you can extend further to general legal regulation. But certainly, at the moment, a lot of the rhetoric that's coming from people who are pushing for medical and clinical therapeutic use is to try and distinguish what they're doing very clearly from what they call recreational use… which is illicit, and you know in their view dangerous and so I think clinical medicine is going to have a very hard time adjusting to psychedelics. They're not like other pharmaceutical medicines. The way that they're used is not the same. This is really a kind of talk therapy in which they're an adjunct and I think at this point I suspect that clinical practitioners have a lot more to learn from what they call “recreational users” than the other way around.
…If you look at the way that marines and military veterans with PTSD are using substances like ayahuasca, you know, that's very much a group thing. It looks more like something like Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous than it does a clinic and it seems that what's really important is to be going through this experience with people who share your condition, who share your trauma, and who also have been through this therapy. There's a great film of this with marines saying to each other, ‘Look I know it sounds crazy taking this weird psychedelic drug but trust me. I was where you are now and it really worked for me and it seems to me that's what you need…’
…We've just seen the first micro-dosing double-blind trial here in Imperial College, London and it seemed to show that micro-dosing has positive effects but also the placebo has positive effects and it was impossible to tell them apart. So, I think a lot of this comes down to this question of whether we go down an exclusively medical route or not, because what's the value of having an exclusively licensed and patented preparation of psilocybin? If you know it's legal to grow your own magic mushrooms… My view is that we should let a thousand flowers bloom [and] there should be, you know, psychedelics can be used in all kinds of ways, and if that works in the context of medical clinical therapy, that's fine, but I don't think the rules for everybody should be determined by whether it fits into this clinical framework or not.
Ariel Valdez asks Mike Jay about the MK Ultra program and mind control experiments:
Psychedelics were a big part of the CIA's secret mind control program, MK Ultra, mostly LSD. This was kind of the height of the Cold War, the idea was to use psychedelic drugs, among other techniques, like… the electroshock, and you know, psychic driving to break down minds and personalities so that you could then rebuild them… I don't think anybody seriously doubted that you could destroy people's minds by giving them huge overdoses of drugs and electroshock and everything else. Part two is that the idea that you could then have a blank slate that you could rebuild a personality never ever got off the ground, so I think with hindsight, this is kind of my point in that piece is, at the time, the cold war assumption was that this was a crucial battle for the mind and that the communists had this and if America didn't have it, they'd lose. Stepping away from that and looking at it from where we are now, it was really just state-sanctioned torture.
Mike Jay refers to the 1930s when psychologists/psychiatrists conducted experiments with mescaline to better understand the human mind. This specific passage involves a surrealist artist named Trevelyan at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital. They asked Trevelyan to draw after taking mescaline.
Trevelyan recalled being driven to the hospital in the morning and injected with masculine crystals in solution at around 10 o'clock. After an hour of slight nausea, suddenly, the fireworks started with their magical transfiguration of everything I looked at. His hand shook as he attempted to draw what he was seeing. Yet while it lasted I could not put a line wrong. The line was no longer on the surface of the paper but quivering in space like a wire. Perspectives and recessions dripped off my pencil. When he shut his eyes a world of cosmic imagery, a sort of mechanical ballet became visible. After a couple of hours he was taken to lunch in the hospital canteen where I remember sitting at a table amongst white-coated doctors with a plate of spaghetti and cauliflower in front of me whose intricate forms fascinated me beyond belief. Trevelyan felt that its primary effect was the hyper awareness of the beauty of things. Under mescaline he wrote I have fallen in love with a sausage roll. I've also looked at pictures by Picasso, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and others and have rejected them all as ready-mades. His productions under the influence he felt have remained valid though I know that they're not great works of art but only the traveler’s sketches from that surprising region of the mind from which without mescaline I'm forever de-barred.
Ruiz asks Mike Jay for one final pitch about his fascinating book, “Mescaline.”
I hope it's full of great stories and really works as an entertaining read from beginning to end, but I also hope that it's kind of mind-expanding in the way that psychedelics are… that it expands our horizons and makes us think about the subject in whole new ways.
Who is Mike Jay?
“Mike Jay has written widely on the history of science and medicine, and particularly on the discovery of psychoactive drugs during the 18th and 19th centuries. His books on the subject include Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century (2000, revised edition 2011) and most recently High Society: mind-altering drugs in history and culture (2010), which accompanied the exhibition he curated at Wellcome Collection in London. The Atmosphere of Heaven is also the third book in his series of biographical narratives of political reformers in 1790s Britain. It follows The Air Loom Gang (2003, revised edition forthcoming 2012) and The Unfortunate Colonel Despard (2004).” - Yale University Press