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"Brand new’ psychedelic discovered

01-11-2005


Hit of the Sacred Elixir Conference (San Jose, California on October 22 - 24) was Earl Crockett's presentation on "a new elixir" in which Earl described his adventures in Baja California discovering a pictoglyph-covered cave and an alleged cactus that was ingested by the inhabitants (who predated the Indians--Earl speculates by thousands of years). He shared the stage with Alexander Shulgin who told of how he analyzes new chemical compounds and how Earl's cactus - Pachycereus pringlei - was indeed a brand new kind of psychedelic.

Cactouasca

Sasha outlined the four basic types of one-compound psychedelics and then described ayahuasca which is a two-compound psychedelic--1) a DMT analogue plus 2) an MAO inhibitor to prevent the first from being destroyed. There are many varieties of ayahuasca that differ in the plant substances that provide these two components--that is, many different plants that carry DMT and many plants that carry MAO inhibitors. There is even something called "pharmauasca" which is not derived from plants at all but which is simply synthetic DMT (in a capsule) and synthetic MAO-inhibitor in another capsule.

Earl's cactus was different from all of these--it contained a lot of MAO inhibitor but no DMT. (DMT, says, Shulgin is found everywhere in nature but never in cactuses). Instead in Earl's cactuses there were mescaline-like substances that have no psychoactive effects on humans--by themselves. Shulgin's guess is that the presence of the MAO-inhibitor in the cactus protects the mescaline-like molecule from degredation and hence permits it to act on the brain in a mescalin-like way. So Earl's cactus is indeed a "brand new elixir"--a heretofore unexplored two-compound psychedelic for which Shulgin coined the term "cactouasca". CACTOUASCA--You heard it here first