Mescaline & the Mad Hatter

Like many a researcher before him (including the late great Havelock Ellis), British Psychiatrist John Smythies was fascinated by the extraordinary visions he had after taking mescaline, an alkaloid derived from a Mexican cactus.* Unlike opium and other drugs, which bring on hallucinations, mescaline seems to leave the power of critical observation intact. And what the subject sees, says Dr. Smythies after comparing notes with his friends, are visions of "the utmost poetical integrity."

If the mescaline taker keeps his eyes closed, he sees riotously colorful "mosaics, networks, flowing arabesques, interlaced spirals, wonderful tapestries . . . great butterflies gently moving their wings, fields of glittering jewels . . . soaring architecture . . . and finally human figures and fully formed scenes where coherent histories are enacted."

With his eyes open he can do even better. Says Smythies: a level-headed medical colleague "spent a quarter of an hour gazing at a plain glass full of water and trying to describe to me the perfection of its diamond brilliance." But there are also distortions. The observer may feel his limbs detach themselves from his body and lie on the floor beside him. (Not funny, insists Dr. Smythies.) The room may grow enormously or change shape, the angles becoming alternately acute and obtuse. Time slows down, so that "teatime goes on forever," and the subject "will feel quite literally that he is at the Mad Hatter's tea party."

But Psychiatrist Smythies is not interested merely in Technicolored 3-dementia. Mescaline, he argues, produces the closest known facsimile of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Researchers who gave up looking for a physical cause of schizophrenia quit too soon, he believes, and largely because psychiatrists and biochemists did not get together on mescaline.

Dr. Smythies, 30, has moved to Canada and is working with Dr. Humphry Osmond at the Saskatchewan (mental) Hospital in Weyburn. In the Journal of Mental Science, the two doctors do some close reasoning. Mescaline, they suggest, breaks down in the body; some resulting "M substance" (chemically related to adrenalin) upsets the brain's sugar consumption and brings on split-personality hallucinations. Similarly, perhaps, stress of the type that brings on schizophrenia upsets the adrenals, and they liberate "M substance."

Drs. Osmond and Smythies think it would be worth while to do a lot of chemical and biochemical testing of mescaline and schizophrenics. After that, they say, either their theory will join countless others on the scrap heap of psychiatry or the cause of schizophrenia will be known.

*It is the active ingredient in the brew made by the Navahos from peyote buttons, which medical missionaries condemn (TIME, June 18, 1951), though some anthropologists insist that the stuff is harmless and none of the missionaries' business.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.