Psyched by Amanda Siebert

Author:Amanda Siebert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Experience of Mescaline: Opening (and Closing) the Doors of Perception

ALTHOUGH MESCALINE ISN’T receiving much attention in the present day, it played a critical role in the emergence of the study of so-called psychedelic plants and compounds, and even inspired the word psychedelic, coined by Humphry Osmond in 1953 after he administered a synthetic version of mescaline to the British author Aldous Huxley.24 The term comes from the Greek words psychē, meaning “mind” or “soul,” and dēloun, which translates as “to make visible” or “to reveal.” When Huxley published a book in 1954 describing his idyllic experience with mescaline, it permanently altered the alkaloid’s reputation.

In this book, The Doors of Perception, Huxley touched on the origins of peyote before describing his journey with the cactus’s active ingredient as “seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”25 Not only did Huxley describe his own experience with mescaline; he asserted the “significant fact” that the drug possibly presented a solution to the chemical imbalance thought at the time to be the cause of schizophrenia. This assertion piqued the interest of scientists, and in the 1950s psychologists tested mescaline as a treatment for schizophrenia—an idea that proved to be false—and later as a treatment for alcohol use disorder.

Unfortunately, mescaline’s potential was hampered by a new drug that had recently been introduced to the world. To both the medical community and the hippies, it seemed to provide effects similar to mescaline’s but in a far more efficient way. It required significantly smaller doses—less than a thousandth of a milligram—with fewer and less severe side effects. Its effects also didn’t last as long. The drug, LSD, stole away the psychedelic spotlight, and by 1962, mescaline research had all but disappeared.

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