Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, by Rhoney Gissen Stanley

He was reading about chromatography and with his wire-rimmed glasses and long hair, he looked like Benjamin Franklin with his balls hanging out. 
-p. 60, Rhoney Gissen Stanley describing the legendary LSD alchemist "Bear" Owsley Stanley in Owsley and Me: My LSD Family.

Now here's a delightful little memoir that was up my counterculture alley. I try to read every book that comes out on cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy and other psychedelics, but it's getting difficult to keep up. Arriving in 2012 and co-written with Al Franken's old and now-dead sidekick, Tom Davis, Stanley writes about the mid-late 1960s in Berkeley as if it were last year, with novelistic patches of remembered dialogue that we just have to take her words for as being...fairly...accurate? 50 years later? Anyway, it was a fun read.

Rhoney Gissen was an upper-class east coast jewish girl who wanted to get as far away from her repressed family as she could, and majoring in English at Berkeley in 1965 did the trick. Her LSD "family" is largely a threesome, with Augustus Owsley "Bear" Stanley III, and Melissa Cargill. The extended family turns out to be quite large: members of Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, members of the Hell's Angels, Richard Alpert (about to go to India and become Ram Dass), other luminaries that many of you could guess.

Gissen Stanley appended Owsley's last name, but they were never married; Gissen took the last name "Stanley" when she went back to school to become a dentist, many years after Owsley took the rap for his entire operation and went to prison; after all, she had had a child with him. The book has a sincere yet odd tone: most of the time the well-educated Gissen is obsessively in love with Owsley, and he loves here too, but it's complicated, and Gissen suffers through much of her memoir in a sort of heart-on-her-sleeve schoolgirl's crush on the charismatic Brilliant Man.

                              Owsley in hat and shades; Jerry Garcia in beard 
                               photo by Rosie McGee

And oh my: Owsley was brilliant. This was the main reason I picked up the book: here's a guy who's known for making the best LSD ever, for turning on almost an entire generation (mostly for idealistic reasons), and he was self-taught. And LSD is notoriously very, very difficult to make well. The ideas many of us got about how much technical know-how went into making the vastly superior or "purest" blue meth in "Breaking Bad"? LSD appears to be more difficult than that to produce at the most pure levels. (In one scene a batch of Owsley LSD is tested in a lab at UC Berkeley and is found to be 99% pure.)

But Owsley was a true modern alchemist, and Rhoney Gissen relates scenarios a-plenty that illustrate the wizard-like aspect of Owsley, who, while making LSD was often seen pouring over thick chemistry textbooks at a kitchen table, all night, in the nude. Here's a scene from early on:

At Bear's house one day, I opened the door to the tall and handsome Richard Alpert. He could have just stepped out of GQ in his polo shirt, tan pants, and boat shoes with tassels. I took him to the kitchen where Bear was naked and totally engrossed in two large books open before him on the table: Electromechanical Metallurgy and The Emerald Tablet of Hermes. Richard and I waited for him to look up and acknowledge us.

"Is he reading those two books at the same time?" he asked. 

"At least." I motioned for him to take a seat. 

Richard sat and began talking to Owsley, who just added the conversation as a third object of his attention. "LSD is not enough to bring me to liberation and bliss. I always come back down into my thinking mind, this body, these clothes." Owsley looked up and uncrossed his legs, moving his balls out of the way with his hands.

Gissen says Owsley saw himself as a psychedelic Prometheus, "enabling mankind to choose to take a sacrament for transformation of mind and soul. His LSD was the purest. Purity of LSD was his raison d'etre." A leitmotif in the book is Owsley, backstage at rock concerts or other gatherings of psychedelic intelligentsia, administering his 99% pure God-Juice sublingually from a Murine bottle he carried with him.

We get one of the most vivid pictures of Owsley yet in this book: his off-beat but erudite ideas about how important it was to eat meat - especially steak - rare; why he ended up living his last decades in extreme biodiversity, off the grid in Australia: because a huge storm was about to hit the Northern Hemisphere and bring on an ice age and Noah's flood-like conditions. (see p.253 for details) About Owsley's love of comic books, ballet, that astrology had actual merit, that the tips of his right hand pinky and ring finger had been lost since childhood (Why, again? It's sorta mysterious: Gissen, noticing hair was growing out of the finger-stumps: "What happened to your fingers?" Owsley, laughs dismissively: "I was a kid. But they grafted skin from my belly. That's why hairs grow.") Gissen paints an Owsley who usually thought if an idea wasn't his own, it was probably wrong. And a lot of the time he was right. He was a gifted lover of women, hated tobacco, and probably didn't let enough people know how much in debt he was to his main squeeze, the gorgeous and ultra-brilliant Melissa Cargill, who did major in Chemistry at Berkeley, and probably deserves much more credit for the purest LSD ever.

While we can understand why such chemists would rather remain mysterious, with hindsight it's perhaps time to reassess the technical and intellectual contribution Cargill made to late 1960s/early 1970s psychedelic culture.

At the same time, Owsley deserves far more notice for his stellar work in acoustics and sound engineering (again: mostly self-taught). His determination to aid and abet the Grateful Dead in bringing forth a new cosmic consciousness via not only LSD, but a synergy of psychedelics in human nervous systems, plus new ways to organize and record live rock music? He still seems relatively unheralded here, eh? He tinkered with speaker placement, condenser microphones, live rock sound controlled by a mixer who was stationed amidst the audience, allowing the band members to hear each other and themselves...prior to Owsley, loud rock bands were very noisy live; the sound was chaos. He played as big a part in engineering concert sound as anyone. How many people are aware of this? Even his home stereo was avant-garde:

If I could not be at a live show, next best was listening to music at Bear's. He modified his home audio system by exchanging the components of the amp and preamp with precision parts he ordered from an aircraft manufacturer. He changed the type of cables and the wiring of the connectors. He had the best speakers  - JBLs with the cones exposed. He even altered these, adding a subwoofer to increase the amplitude of the bass. His placement of the two tall speakers was calculated to optimize the quality of the sound. I pulled out an LP of the Bulgarian Women's Choir. I placed the record into the turntable and dropped the needle. 

"Jerry Garcia loves this," I told Richard (Alpert)."
"Jerry Garcia is a bodhisattva," he said.

Later, Owsley is explaining to Gissen: "Nobody has figured out how to record live music. We can do it! We need time, and we have to get this acid tabbed, too. LSD is part of the alchemical equation and helps the music become transformative."

A word on Owsley's background: his great-great grandfather had come to Unistat on the Mayflower. His grandfather had been governor and US. Senator from Kentucky. His godfather was a Supreme Court Justice on the Earl Warren court, or so Rhoney Gissen says; I was unable to identify which Supreme was Owsley's godfather after at least fourteen minutes of Google searches. He grew up believing what his grandfather taught him: that Prohibition violated the Constitution: an adult person had the right to do with their own nervous system what they willed. This seems partly why, after his acid-team got busted in Orinda, just over the hills from Berkeley,  Owsley eventually decided he could take the rap for everyone and, using a stack of law books, defend himself - with counsel - and not go to prison. But of course, that's not the way things shake out in this Epoch, as you well know, my friends. Owsley did a stretch in many prisons in the California Archipelago, much as Timothy Leary did. (Owsley learned metallurgy in prison, and his belt buckles sell like gold to this day...)

Speaking of Leary, there was a point where it was thought Owsley's "Hobbit" house in Berkeley (HERE, see about 50% of the way down the page) might be hot - the Feds may have been on to him - so someone in his circle pointed out there was a house available in the Berkeley hills near the one that Leary owned, but he balked because he perceived Leary as someone who sought media attention, and Owsley wanted nothing to do with that.

For denizens of Berkeley and surroundings, Grizzly Peak, Telegraph, Bancroft, and Sproul Plaza appear; Marin and the Oakland hills and the great rock auditoriums of San Francisco (Fillmore West/Winterland/Carousel Ballroom) are characterized. Bill Graham and Owsley didn't get along. Also: Boulder and Denver (and unnamed Tim Scully), and Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and Altamont appear. Owsley and Gissen visit Leary at Millbrook but Leary's only interested in drinking and the Owsley crew get busted by Liddy's pals as they leave. There's lots of driving while high on LSD. There are anecdotes about Hendrix being recorded privately at the Masonic Hall in San Francisco whilst everyone was very high (read to see what turned out with the tapes!), a quasi-hilarious bad trip with Buddy Miles, and a harrowing bad trip with Robert Hunter, who, it turns out, did an insane amount of strong LSD, by accident. They visit the Hollywood Hills and meet George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, and David Crosby.

I liked this book.

A couple of extra notes: I find it striking how acid cognoscenti were aided by the children of the wealthy elite in Unistat. Famously, the Mellon family's children helped Leary; Owsley was greatly aided by these types too. However, I fail to see any sort of the conspiracy that some have: the elites, in conjunction with CIA, sent their children to derail the counterculture. I think rich kids sometimes have different values than mumsy and pop. Also: this book is yet another that draws a distinction between the renegade flavor of the psychedelic counterculture on the West Coast of Unsitat, with the more Asiatic-religion-influenced trippers on the East Coast of Unistat. I wonder how "true" this distinction really was; I've seen it recur in book after book. I suspect much of this distinction has been born of a meme that propagated well, and even had "them dat wuz there" believing it, years later, as they recalled their lives in, say, 1969, at age 23.

Finally: the most striking element of the book was, to me, the passages in which Gissen is tripping marvelously through her 1960s, stoned, immaculate, listening to Ravi Shankar...and then the sudden juxtapositions of technical language in exposition of the making of LSD, which at times seem almost Joycean. (See, for example, pp. 48-52; 54-61; 71-74 (making DMT); and 101-104.) A taste, to ride out of the too-long review here:

Melissa took a washed beaker, squirted acetone on it, and held it up for inspection.

"See how clean! Look, the beaker is dry. Every piece of glassware must have a final rinse of acetone."

"Oh, that acetone smells terrible. Anything that smells that bad can't be good for you."

"Acetone smells bad but the flasks are glad," Melissa responded. She blasted the beaker with compressed air. "This hastens the drying process." She examined the glassware; if it were wet and there were any streaks or spots, it would come back for a do-over. 

We fell into a routine: eat, sleep, and work.

We usually worked at night, and for this phase of the synthesis, columns clamped to rods were setup. Tim was in charge of packing them because he was tallest. The process is called column chromatography, or affinity chromatography, because the desired LSD - the iso-LSD - and the impurities have different affinities for the alumina adsorbent and separate out at different rates, or affinities, as they travel down the column. According to Bear, the trick was to get the mother liquor down the column without breaking off into crystals along the way.

When Owsley first started making LSD, he did not use column chromatography to purify the acid. He used vacuum dessication...



Here's Owsley talking about psychedelic effects interacting with sound equipment:

Self-Experimentation: Notes and a Few Colorful Examples

A quasi-hallowed, if underestimated and mis-appreciated history attends those investigators who used themselves as subjects. Perhaps the most famous - or most-oft-cited - work on the subject focuses on intrepid medical self-experimenters: Lawrence K. Altman's gripping Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine. 

I've found my readings over the past 30 years marked by sudden tales of self-experimentation, and a 900 pager has yet to be done, or at least I've yet to see some compendium on the subject.

What strikes me is the underappreciated nature of the methodology, and I hope to tackle the obvious seeming "problem" of various "biases" usually called into account by those who assert that the double-blind, placebo (if the study can have one) controlled study is the only valid mode of investigation.

Recent years have seen a resurgence in self-experimentation at the level of Psychology, and there's no better spokesman than Seth Roberts, but I'll get to him later. First: a few of my favorite self-experimenters.

Sir Humphry Davy
Let's return to those profoundly painful years of surgery in the late 18th century, pre-anaesthesia. As the retired professor of Marine Biology Trevor Norton puts it, it went something like this:


1. Site the operating room out of earshot of other patients.
2. Be excessively solicitous over the distress caused to the poor surgeon.
3. Strap the patient down securely.
4. Have the patient bite down on the surgeon's walking stick.
5. Slice and saw at speed.
-p.24, Smoking Ears and Screaming Teeth: A Celebration of Scientific Eccentricity and Self-Experimentation, by Norton.


Around the beginning of the 19th century, some medics volunteered to sniff or inhale one or another of the newly discovered gasses. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, and even carbon monoxide were thought to be therapeutic to inhale. Who knows? Maybe these new gasses are miracle cures?

                                      Sir Humphry Davy: fearless chemist, got his friends 
                                      high on laughing gas, sold science as a good idea


Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was brilliant, a good communicator, and a bit of a showman. He gave himself credit for "discovering" Michael Faraday. (Davy died of congenital heart disease at age 50, after writing very popular essays on possible alien life and science and philosophy.) And it seems, Davy was fearless to the point of daftness. (Because he knew heart disease stalked his family? "I'm gonna die early I might as well be a hero?") The guy would try anything on himself, into himself, noting the results, upping the dosage, almost dying, dialing it back a bit, taking notes. His colleagues were relieved to see him show up the next morning, one noting that Davy risked his life, "as if he had two or three others in reserve, on which he could fall back in case of necessity."


Quickly, around the age of 21, Davy began to assume the much-ballyhooed gas therapy was overhyped. He had tried them all himself, finding carbon monoxide particularly exhausting. It had him "sinking into annihilation, and had just enough power to drop the mouthpiece from my unclosed lips...There is every reason to believe, that if I had taken four or five inhalations instead of three, they would have destroyed life immediately." He quickly breathed in some oxygen, and went on, unafraid. A week later he inhaled some solvent that seared his epiglottis and had him choking, but he made sure he kept measuring his pulse all the while. All in the name of Science!


A colorful character who invented the miner's safety lamp, Davy became something of a celebrity-scientist in his time (if you can imagine such a thing when the only mass media were books and newspapers), and helped convince the Ruling Class that they ought to invest heavily in science, because it's the ultimate tool for the production of wealth.


In the weirdness of time, a new gas came along that was creating a bit of a stir. Davy was skeptical - he'd had some very close-calls with gasses - but had to give it a whirl. This stuff was called nitrous oxide. He tried it, and found that it was good. He upped the doses every day, trying this stuff four or five times per day for a week. The verdict from Davy on what we now commonly call "laughing gas": "highly pleasurable... thrilling...I lost all connection with external things: I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized, I imagined, I made discoveries." 


Early Victorian hippie!


Davy was so wildly enthusiastic he turned on his pals the poets Southey and Coleridge, and a guy who was into thesauruses named Roget. They loved it. Soon the cognoscenti and well-off made haste to the Pneumatic Institute at Bristol. (Where have we heard this story before?)


Here's a horrible irony before I move on to another self-experimenter: Davy soon after suffered from pain from his wisdom teeth. Naturally, he grabbed for the wonder-gas. It worked. He wrote that Nitrous "appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations." Oddly, no one urged this on, and surgeries were done without Nitrous for another 40 years! I can't tell you why this happened - I can't find a definitive answer - and this story of prolonged pain in surgery gets even worse.


Around the same time that Davy was experimenting in England, a Japanese surgeon named Seishu Hanaoka (1760-1835) was learning surgery from European books, but he'd turned to Chinese medicine in an attempt to find a solution to the Extreme Pain Problem. He experimented on animals for 20 years with plant extracts that might dull pain and he thought he'd finally hit on the right solution, so he gave it to his wife and she went blind. (Not self-experimentation, aye, but the history of this stuff is also rife with offspring, spouses, and other family members who "volunteered to go first.") Seishu was undeterred and finally hit on a potion of muscle relaxers, sedatives, and analgesics. In 1804 he removed a tumor from a woman relatively painlessly. He then went on to do another 150 operations with this potion, but Japan's insularity toward the rest of the world made Seishu's anaesthesia a secret to the West. The Internet makes this kind of story impossible for our times, doesn't it?
(These anecdotes and more: see Trevor Norton's book, ibid, pp.22-43, "Sniff It and See." Norton's a wonderful writer, and funny!)

                                 Nikola Tesla in his Colorado Springs lab. This is 
                                    apparently not as "shocking" as it looks!

Stubbins Ffirth
I know his name looks like something out of Dickens, but he was oh-so real, and was determined, in early 1800s Philadelphia, to prove that the periodic breakouts of the vicious yellow fever were not contagious. He went to garish lengths to show his hypothesis was sound, in an effort to get his MD. He submitted his copious data eventually and was awarded the degree. Here are some of the things he did to support his idea:


Because the disease was rampant in the summer months but died off in the cold winter, only to return when the warm weather returned, Ffirth reasoned that warm weather overly-excited people, and yellow fever was caused by the stimulation of heat, food and noise. People just needed to calm down! Meanwhile, everyone else believed yellow fever was contagious. To prove it wasn't, Ffirth watched a patient vomit hot black mucus-laden coffee-grind-looking bile, and he filled his cup with some and drank it down. He didn't get sick.


Then Ffirth kept a dog in a room and fed it bread soaked in a patient's yellow-fever vomit. The dog ate it and seemed to like it, never once getting ill. Ffirth - a thorough medical student, this one - made an incision in his forearm and poured more yellow-fever vomit into his wound. Nothing. Maybe some inflammation, which subsided. He made a deeper cut and poured some more in. Still in the pink. He poured fever-vomit into his eyes. (I'm not making this up: see Alex Boese's book Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, pp.195-198) Ffirth heated some vomit on a skillet and inhaled the fumes, to no ill effect. He then created a whole room of yellow-fever-vomit sauna-fumes, basked in the vapors, and felt a headache, "some nausea," and perspired a lot, but it didn't last, and he probably skipped home to a good night's sleep.


He put yellow-fever vomit into pills and took them. He drank glasses of the stuff mixed with water, saying "the taste was slightly acid." He realized he'd become used to the black vomit of deathly sick folk, and even kinda liked it! He even cooked up a recipe for a yellow-fever-vomit liqueur, which I will include here, because some of you (Hey, who KNOWS the type of people who read the OG?) will want to have it, just in case:


If black vomit be strained through a rag, and the fluid thus obtained be put into a bottle or vial, leaving about one-third part of it empty, this being corked and sealed, if set by for one or two years, will assume a pale red colour, and taste as though it contained a portion of alkohol.
(NB the aging process! Don't come to me and complain your vomit bile tastes "wrong" if you don't properly age it!- the OG)


I know what you're saying: this whack-job Ffirth didn't use other bodily fluids from sick patients, or surely he would've perished. Wrong: he made incisions in his arms and worked in the sweat, urine, blood and saliva of very sick yellow fever patients, with only minor inflammation. Ffirth could only assume he'd more than proved his point: yellow fever was not contagious. He was awarded the MD.


Okay: we now know that yellow fever is caused by mosquito bites carrying an RNA virus. The mosquitoes bite in the hot summer months. Ffirth could have gotten sick. Why didn't he? Boese cites an authority on infectious diseases, Christian Sandrock of UC Davis, who thinks Ffirth got lucky, because mosquito-borne diseases like yellow fever or West Nile virus require direct transmission from mosquito to host. It turns out Ffirth got lucky. He was right: you can't get yellow fever from someone else, but he wrong as to why. It's tempting to say he drank all that vomit "for nothing," but science VALUES wrong ideas like this; we now know you can pour the vomit from a patient with yellow fever into your eye sockets and you'll be fine, come out "smelling like roses," so to speak...just don't get bit by a mosquito! Had he picked smallpox, he'd have died quickly.


Still: hat's off to the brave Stubbins Ffirth, and...bottom's up!


[The aforementioned Alex Boese's 10 Strangest Self-Experiments Ever. I like the guy who did his own surgery.]


The Great Generalist, Somewhat Overweening: Buckminster Fuller
Broke and feeling like a loser, in 1927 Bucky decided knowledge and assumptions about what he or others "knew" was probably based in language, and there might be a problem with language getting in the way of solving problems. So he went silent for two years.


"All this was pretty difficult for my wife, because we were in Chicago and didn't have any money. We had an apartment in the least expensive fireproof tenement I could find, because we did have our baby. I really did stop all sounds, and then gradually started wanting to use a particular sound. I was finally pretty sure I would know what the effects would be on my fellow man if I made a particular sound. I wanted to be sure that when I did communicate that, I really meant to communicate thusly, and that this was me communicating and not somebody else."


Words were tools that mankind developed, but like all tools, they could be used unwisely. By going silent he might learn to re-think how to use words to say what he had thought for himself, uncontaminated by received wisdom. And it seems to have worked. (< Have a gander at that site.)


And the way he used words! Anyone who has read any of his books will be struck by his unorthodox verb-ing use of verbs (because physics tells us that "nouns" are, at the pre-verbal level, dynamic, whirling masses of atoms, nothing is static) and the geometric aspect of his peculiar linguistic fluency.


Here he is, talking, 6 minutes:

Alexander "Sasha"Shulgin
Psychedelic drugs. There's LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and peyote, DMT, and probably a couple more you've heard about but have forgotten and that's it, right? No, there are over 300 other psychedelic drugs, most of them synthesized by a man, now 86, who has worked for the DEA and was Professor of Chemistry at Berkeley. He built a lab on his property not far from Berkeley, and with his lifelong knowledge of pharmacological chemistry, concocts analogs of known drugs, never quite knowing how they'll turn out. Add an extra carbon atom here, some nitrogen over there, and the neurological effects can turn out to be quite different from the original potion. How does he know what it's like? He tries them himself. Then he writes a report later, basing it on notes taken or what someone who was not on the drug observed. And memory of the "trip." The range of effects - extremely erotic for one drug, nightmarish for another, dreamy lassitude with enriched colors and sounds with another, uncontrolled vomiting, temporary paralysis, a feeling that his bones were melting, floating, long-lasting euphoria, etc. 


If something has a particularly interesting effect, his wife will try it too and report on the effects. They note the dosages, how long the trip lasts, how long after ingestion it takes to feel effects, what the "peak" of the experience is like. There is an underground of knowledgeable "psychonauts" who will gladly assist in probing a particular drug. Shulgin re-discovered methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, or "Ecstasy," and it then became a Big Deal.


Why does Shulgin try these things himself? 

"I take them myself because I am interested in their activity in the human mind. How would you test that in a rat or mouse?"

He thinks we have the right to experiment with ourselves, and when Unistat tried to keep his knowledge from the public, he published it in books, and if you ever get a chance to sit for an hour or two and page through (the at-times admittedly dauntingly technical) PIHKAL or TIKHAL, it ought to be an eye-opener. Recently a documentary on Shulgin was released, but I have yet to see it, as I write this, although I just now noticed the full 90 minute doc in on You Tube, so I'll include it at the end of this blogspew. For those without the 90 mins to spare, here's a one-minute trailer:

Democratization of Self-Experimentation
This DIY idea has been quietly catching on, and I recently maxed out my library card and brought home titles such as Mind Hacks: Tips and Tools For Using Your Brain, Upgrade Your Life, and The Road To Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games by K. Anders Ericsson, who tested Joshua Foer's performance on cognitive abilities, including memory, which I mentioned HERE while discussing Foer's road to using a 2000 year old "memory palace" technique in order to win a "mental athlete" memory competition. 


The number of books that report on the author's experience in spending a year (or so) doing a particular outre thing has cascaded in the past ten years. I think of rock critic Neil Strauss falling in with a bunch of not-so-great looking guys who are intensely interested in techniques that work for picking up women (The Game), and Strauss's more recent true-tales of the extreme lengths he went to to become a survivalist because of what happened in Unistat after 9/11, Emergency!:This Book Will Save Your Life, or Beth Lisick's hilarious Helping Me Help Myself, in which she wakes up on New Year's Day with a killer hangover, disgusted with herself, then spends a year by reading and following a different self-help guru each month. There was some bright young guy who mined metal ores and eventually made his own toaster by hand, whose book I have not read. There are many more. 


Scientific Methodology and Problems With Bias
Seth Roberts, emeritus professor at UC Berkeley and some university in China, seems to have had quite a large influence on this...self-experimentational movement? 

                              Seth Roberts: found a way to manipulate 
                              his own weight via unorthodox methods


Roberts seems to have started off testing his dermatologist's recommendation that he use tetracycline and benzoyl peroxide for his acne. (He's 58 now, so this was a while back.) He took more of the antibiotic than recommended, then counted his pimples. He took less and counted. He was told by "experts" that diet has nothing to do with acne. He assumed the over-the-counter benzoyl peroxide was a sham, but when he finds out what works for him, after looking at his data: tetracycline doesn't work (and he'd assumed it would), and the OTC cream did work. So: he found out what he didn't expect, and this gets at what his critics charge: self-confirmatory bias makes self-experimentation worthless. You must have well-controlled double-blind placebo studies. Seth says: maybe. 


An interesting self-experimenter who's been influenced by Seth is Timothy Ferriss. Here's a link to Ferriss's blog, but note that Seth Roberts argues for the self-experimental method very well in the text below the two videos, said text appearing in Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Body. (Note his points on Mendel and Darwin.) Roberts also defends the "unreasonable effectiveness" of his methodology HERE. Seth's blog is HERE. Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen has been on board with Roberts since 2007.


What do you think? Is it all part of Operation Mindfuck?


This blogspew is dedicated to the first person to eat an artichoke; Kevin Warwick, who wants to be the first cyborg (see HERE and HERE); Morgan Spurlock, who ate supersized McDonald's food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 30 and made McDonald's re-think some of their menu; and some never-to-be identified primitive homo sapiens who, while standing with a friend, poked him in the ribs and said, "You see that white thing coming out of that chicken's ass? Call me crazy, but I'm eating it!"


Here's the Shulgin doc, Dirty Pictures (2011 Etienne Sauret):

Some Colorful Chemists

Often, when we go to study the earliest history of philosophy, we find that they were concerned with what everything was made of. Thales of Miletus said everything could be reduced to water, for example.

Very quickly the metaphysics of air became a heated topic. Plato (probably influenced by the Pythagoreans), thought air was made up of octahedrons, and it was "elementally" between fire and water. Plato also guessed (divine intuition?) that water, when it was "divided by fire or by air, on re-forming, may become one part fire and two parts air." We now know water is one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen. Not a bad guess, Plato! Score one for the right wing rich kid whose favorite teacher was Socrates...

When Anaximenes said, contra Thales, that all was ultimately air, which via motion, caused transformations in everything in the universe (these Greeks thought Big!), Nietzsche later said Anaximenes's statement that "Everything is created by the condensation and rarefication of air, but motion is eternally arising...," that this was the first scientific worldview. "As our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air surround the universe." - Anaximenes

During the French Enlightenment, Antoine Lavoisier, building on his predecessors' findings about air, really nailed it, getting rid of extraneous jargon, and conducting ingeniously creative experiments to demonstrate the chemical composition of air. He said that there was about one-fifth of air that was "oxygen." Then he figured out that most of the rest was nitrogen, and that fire seemed inherent in oxygen and its play with nitrogen. Then, during the Terror, because he seemed too highly placed, he was guillotined, which seems something less than Enlightened.
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But what about alchemy and Paracelsus and those guys? Alchemy was definitely the forerunner of chemistry, and quite ancient. It is also rarely discussed in university chemistry classes, I understand. 'Tis a pity, because the overall flavor of desire to find the Primordial Stuff, turn cheap metals into gold, live forever and abolish evil: these still are worthy goals. And the chemists might not want to hear about alchemy, they might be embarrassed about it, as if it was a story about a crazy great-greatfather, but the long hard road to where the chemists are now can be appreciated, to my eyes, by how diligently knowledge was accumulated by alchemists all over the world, for perhaps 1500 years. One book I read recently said there were Vedic texts on alchemical ideas from 10,000 years ago...For many alchemists toiling throughout its long history, it was necessary to avoid Authority; whatever they were doing was mysterious and therefore threatening to the Ruling Class. (A select few alchemists worked as Wizards for the Ruling Class: reading auspices, as court astrologers, etc) The 3rd CE Roman Emperor Diocletian decreed that all alchemical manuscripts were "against nature," and must be destroyed. He would have fit right in with the George W. Bush administration.

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I hear one of you asking, plaintively, "what about drugs?" Indeed. What about them! Were the earliest beer makers (6th BCE, according to Wikipedia) "doing" chemistry? Alchemy? I don't know, but surely, there were a few fermenters who tinkered (this business of tinkering turns out to be maybe the most underrated aspect of chemists' work), and gradually beer became more interesting.
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There is a long history of amateur herbalists that seems to intersect with alchemy/chemistry. The Inquisition thought that the mere gathering of plants was an indication of witchcraft. Please ponder the deep sickness in the human race that wants to persecute some people for investigating the magick of certain plants. Thou shalt not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! OR: As Oscar Wilde said, and I agree, obedience to authority is the original sin...
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The "al" in alchemy comes from Arabic, so right away we see some reason why it's threatening to Westerners. But the "chemy" comes from Khemia, the Greek name for Egypt, the "black land." So much in the philology seems fraught with peril! (To the ordinary, fearful homo sap.) On the other hand, the tall pointy cone hats? I'm waiting for those to come back into style.

(Which reminds me: many years ago I had a friend whose father was a math wizard. Some corporation would call him with a problem and he'd work on it for six months, often, as I remember him telling me, inventing a computer language in order to devise the right circuit/part/whatever for the company. He worked out of his house, so he was home a lot and was a nudist, too. When he solved the problem he celebrated by wearing a wizard hat around the house. Then the company sent him a check for $75,000. Why did I bring this up? Oh yea...)
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Well, physics and chemistry and then biology and now, over the last 120 years or so, "modern medicine" have flowered from all the toiling. Methodologies seem crucial in the turn toward the relatively sudden and rapid logarithmic gains made there. And sufficient wealth scattered amongst the population to allow a significant number of tinkerers armed with basic knowledge and methodologies. And then there is the downside: chemical warfare, depleted topsoil, disease-causing air, obesity. But all in all, I'll take it, given the upsides.
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Back to alchemy and its long, rich, odd history: to many physical scientists in universities, the social sciences are in something like the alchemy state. (I personally do not think this, but it's an interesting way to look at it. Economics has certainly seemed topheavy with absolute bovine excreta for much of its history, for example.)

But maybe sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics...are poised on the brink of "real" science: of the human mind-in-society? Why the worship of flags? Why the racism? Why the chimp-like status hierarchies that must be defended to the death? Why the the knee-jerk search for Authorities to tell us what to do and think? Why the inhumane grasping for the symbols of wealth, above all other values? Why does anyone starve, not have access to clean drinking water, and a safe place to sleep? Anyone who tells us we've got most of it All Figured Out, must have workable answers to these Questions.
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A workable Theory of Everything might look like this:

T=A+B

Where T is the hypothetical ultimate theory, A is what we understand now, and B is what we don't understand yet. Robert Anton Wilson gives us this equation, in Right Where You Are Sitting Now, and he calls it a "theophany." It could function in the neo-alchemical desiderata as well.