Topic
Chemistry, isolation, and physiological study of psychoactive substances.
The Chemistry and Pharmacology of Piper methysticum and Related Species
Alexander Shulgin's review of kava, Piper methysticum, covering Pacific preparation practices, pharmacological classification, and the chemistry of kavalactones and related Piper species.
Moreau de Tours on dawamesc, self-experiment, and experimental psychiatry
Selected passages from Moreau de Tours's 1845 psychiatric treatise on hashish, including his insistence on personal experience, description of dawamesc preparation and dosing, and claim that hashish offered a unique experimental route into the psychology of madness.
Ernst von Bibra's German comparative account of Amanita and Cannabis
Selective excerpts from Ernst von Bibra's 1855 German survey of narcotic Genussmittel, focused on fly agaric and hashish. The passages show a mid-century comparative framework linking Amanita, Cannabis, opium, alcohol, travel accounts, chemistry, and differential effects across persons and places.
A Study of the Drug, with Especial Reference to its Physiological Action upon Man, with Report of Experiments
Prentiss and Morgan conducted the first American clinical study of peyote at Columbian University on buttons supplied by ethnologist James Mooney. They recorded physiological effects alongside subjects' first-person accounts of visions, including kaleidoscopic colors and dissociative experiences.
S. Weir Mitchell's account of his own peyote self-experiment on May 24, 1896, read before the American Neurological Society. Mitchell describes detailed visions and includes a second self-experiment by a colleague, Dr. Eshner, with physiological notes and subjective observations.
A pharmacologist at St Thomas's Hospital reports systematic experiments on Anhalonium alkaloids using frogs, cats, dogs, and rabbits, combined with self-experimentation. Dixon's account is more clinically restrained than Weir Mitchell's or Ellis's but adds music-color synaesthesia and comparisons to cannabis and strychnine.
A Study of a Divine Plant
Havelock Ellis's account of his own peyote self-experiment, conducted on Good Friday 1897 in his London chambers. Written for a general scientific audience, it situates his diary of jewel-like visions within the clinical work of Prentiss, Morgan, and Weir Mitchell, alongside Indigenous religious use of the plant.
Process for the Preparation of Alkyloxyaryl-, Dialkyloxyaryl- and Alkylenedioxyarylaminopropanes (Firm E. Merck, Darmstadt)
German Reich Patent No. 274350 (1912) describes arylaminopropane synthesis from safrole. Example 4 yields MDMA by heating a brominated intermediate with methylamine—the earliest documented synthesis. The patent claims MDMA only as an unnamed chemical intermediate toward unspecified therapeutic compounds, not as a substance of interest itself.
Safford, a USDA botanist, analyzes peyote's physiological effects and Native American ceremonial use in 1915. The article incorporates sworn testimony from Menominee, Omaha, and Winnebago members of the Sacred Peyote Society.
A 1923 doctoral thesis reporting Fischer Cárdenas's isolation of the yagé alkaloid that Rafael Zerda Bayón had named telepathine (telepatina) decades earlier without isolating it. Seven case reports detail effects on human subjects, including the author's self-experiment, describing vivid dreams, visual hallucinations, and euphoria at low doses, followed by a systematic summary of physiological action.
Rouhier's two-part dossier for Bulletin des Sciences Pharmacologiques: a translation of Barriga Villalba's 1923 paper on alkaloid yagéine, followed by Rouhier's ethnographic and pharmacological notes. Rouhier catalogues dose-dependent effects and includes chemical analysis of a Jívaro preparation.
Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin announces his isolation of banisterine from Banisteria caapi and its identity to harmine. He describes animal experiments and preliminary human trials showing that banisterine relieved the muscular rigidity of encephalitis lethargica (post-influenza sleeping sickness).
A 1955 medical film made for the drug company Wm. S. Merrell about Howard D. Fabing's experiments at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati. A 22-year-old graduate student, "Ronnie," takes 100 micrograms of LSD; the film then shows Merrell's compound MER-17 (azacyclonol, sold as Frenquel) given to prevent or reverse the effects. It belongs to the 1950s search for drugs that could block a "model psychosis."
A Chilean psychiatrist's report on harmala alkaloids, ayahuasca-related beta-carbolines, and comparative human experiments with harmaline and mescaline at the University of Chile.
A short Brazilian natural-products chemistry article confirming the double use of Virola theiodora bark in Yomanê hallucinogenic snuff and arrow poison from the Tototobi River region of Roraima.
Berlin pharmacologist Louis Lewin (1850–1929) reports on "Muscale Buttons" received from Parke, Davis & Co. during a visit to the United States in 1887. The botanist Paul Hennings identified the dried cactus as a new species and named it Anhalonium Lewinii after him, and Lewin describes a crude base he called anhalonine and its strychnine-like convulsant effects in frogs, pigeons and rabbits. Hosted here are the introduction, the preliminary chemistry, and the full section on the drug's effects, with the historical survey of cacti omitted.
Leipzig pharmacologist Arthur Heffter (1859–1925) reports his separation of five alkaloids from mescal buttons, among them mescaline ("Mezcalin"), and a series of self-experiments made between June and November 1897. Testing the whole drug, its resin, the mixed alkaloids and each isolated base in turn, he found that 0.15 g of mescaline hydrochloride alone reproduced the visions, slowed pulse, dilated pupils and loss of time sense produced by the cactus. Hosted here are the description of mescaline and its salts and the whole of section VI on the drug's action in humans.