Future Highs -- 50 years later

Five years ago, I wrote here about the Playboy article I wrote in 1977. Now, 50 years later...

From my post here:

In 1997, I proposed to Playboy an article on the future of consciousness. They said they would assign the article if I made it about future highs. The scientist called "G" in this article is the late great Sasha Shulgin, who became a friend for many years. 

From my original Playboy article:

By the year 2001, the man and woman above town might select their states of consciousness from moment to moment and commute between mental levels as easily as we now commute between continents. To Stanislas Lem, the author of the passage quoted above, the "cryptochemocracy" of the future was a science fiction plot. And so were moon rockets, to Jules Verne. The foundations of that weird new world of tomorrow are being constructed today, by scientists, not science-fiction writers: While drug designers modernize the ancient art of intoxication, social scientists are sketching scenarios about the future of our mental state.

Some seeker of inner knowledge may be risking life, limb and brain damage while you read this, just to bring you a better way to alter your consciousness. At this moment, anthropologists in the Amazon are searching for telepathy- inducing vines and chemists in New Jersey are hallucinating the shapes of their next molecular euphoriants. Transpersonal psychotherapists are known to be floating in tanks of salt water and psychophysiologists have been seen tuning their nervous systems to new resonant frequencies. Because so many different leading-edge research fields now are closing in on the biological, electrochemical, psychological origins of human consciousness, every branch of science seems to be going into the mind-changing business.

Like any technology, the first products of psychochemistry have been crude "uppers" or "downers" or "tranquillizers." Eventually, more subtle effects will be possible; MDMA was a milestone along that path. Will we still eschew chemical mood-changers when they help us think better, or inspire us to create and invent? That is one of the answers G. seeks. It was he who told me about Lem's Futurological Congress, a fictional depiction of a future psychochemical civilization where hypothetical "benignimizers" like Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felecitine, Empathan, and, yes, Ecstasine, induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. And, as G. quoted to me toward the beginning of our first talk "...by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl you obtained, instead, Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine...and many other polyparanoidal stimulants..."

Dr. G. was inventing mind-altering drugs decades ago, when everyone still thought LSD was a kind of landing craft. We aren't talking about some kind of bootlegger here, but a genuine, legitimate, pharmaceutical chemist. And if you don't think pharmaceutical chemistry is an important part of our society, consider the fact that over 5 billion tranquillizers are consumed this year in the USA alone. The big drug manufacturers have staffs of pharmaceutical chemists who think up new ways to send us up, down, or sideways. G., however, has his sights on tranquillity, insight, joy, inspiration -- all those states of mind we traditionally request in prayers to gods or invocations of muses.

It is Dr. G.'s custom and scientific protocol to ingest his own compounds and commune with the geometry of his transformed perceptions, sometimes finding clues to his next creation in the pattern of his hallucinations. Bizarre as this research method might seem, there is historical precedent for hallucinatory theorizing: The science of organic chemistry was born when a chemist named Kekule dreamed of a snake that swallowed its own tail and awoke to draw the first diagram of the tail-swallowing benzene ring.

From the recent Atlantic article:

For thousands of years, humans have searched nature for mind-altering substances through a process of trial and (sometimes fatal) error. People have choked down foul roots, boiled woody vines, and scraped bitter bark off of tree trunks. They’ve milked toad glands and chugged the urine of reindeer that were themselves tripping on fungi. These experiments have revealed hundreds of plants and fungi that contain psychedelic compounds.

Now that psychedelic research has been legitimized, scientists at university labs and biotech start-ups are wondering whether they can create a better one. It’s a seductive idea, that some new and perfect drug might be hiding in the near-limitless parameter space of synthetic chemistry. Who wouldn’t want to take a little pill that could help you slough off your old self and see the world anew, a half-day therapy that would leave you with a feeling of enlightenment, if not in the exalted state itself?