The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (68 page)

In addition to Nichols, Grob, and myself, the original Heffter board included Mark Geyer, a psychopharmacologist from the University of California, San Diego; George Greer, M.D., a psychiatrist and MDMA researcher from Santa Fe; and Philip Wolfson, M.D., a Bay Area psychotherapist. Our first meeting took place at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in the Angeles National Forest east of L.A., a rustic spot perfect for planning and “envisioning.” While the board has changed over the years, it continues to include many leading researchers in the field, and the Heffter remains the premier sponsor of basic and clinical research on psychedelics (
www.heffter.org
). I’ve always been proud to be affiliated with the institute, though I’ve sometimes felt a bit out of place, lacking a high-level research position, lab, or other such resource. But someone had to represent the interests of ethnopharmacology, and I was fortunate to have that role fall to me.

José Cabral and Dennis preparing voucher specimens, UDV study, 1993.

After my trip to Brazil, I continued my efforts to expand my employer’s presence there, as part of the company strategy we’d drawn up when I started the job. Indeed, I spent much of my time writing and presenting budgets and work plans to the “steering committee,” a group that ran the operation in the absence of the visionary who had created it. I was learning the ropes of corporate life, or so I thought. It took almost the entire year to get the OK on my budgets, but the results looked good. The committee approved nearly $600,000 to set up a lab in Manaus and start collecting and evaluating plants for possible use in cosmetics and medicine or as food sources. There was even a line item to buy a small boat for expeditions up the more remote tributaries. I’d come a long way from my days with the Heraclitistas on the River of Poisons.

Or had I? I soon discovered there was something just as problematic about steering by committee north of the equator. I figured that getting the go-ahead was a mere formality. Instead, at a meeting early in 1994, I was informed that getting a budget approved didn’t mean I could actually spend it. Which surprised me. It turned out there was a reality parallel to the one I’d been living in, and that’s where the spending decisions were actually made. To put it simply, there would be no new lab in the Amazon, no botanical explorations, and no boat.

I’d be at Aveda another year and a half, but from that moment on I realized I’d never accomplish the goals we’d defined at the outset. The clues were there before, of course, even if I’d chosen not to articulate them. There was a difference between Horst’s vision, which was environmentally oriented and forward-looking, and what really went on from day to day. He wanted to save the planet; the middle managers running the place basically viewed their mission as getting shampoo out the door. Anything that didn’t directly support that rather mundane goal became an impediment.

I finally gave notice in 1995. Most people who left Aveda didn’t do so by choice; perhaps because I did, Horst and I parted amicably and remained friends. I respect him very much, and I’d like to believe the feeling is mutual. After he sold his company to Estée Lauder in 1997 for a reported $300 million, I think it’s fair to say he became more relaxed and playful. And who wouldn’t? Having that kind of money in your account will do wonders for stress, especially if having the money means you’re able to spend it.

By then, the herbal boom triggered by DSHEA had fully begun. After leaving Aveda, I took a job as the R&D director for Nutraceutix, a company based in Redmond, a position that let me work from home for three weeks each month and spend a week at its plant in Washington. The company made probiotic supplements for livestock feed but wanted to capitalize on the burgeoning demand for dietary supplements for humans. After developing some formulations for Odwalla, the organic juice company in Santa Cruz, California, we started a project to grow ginseng using “hairy root” propagation, a cool technology for generating large amounts of root biomass in vats without actually growing entire plants. In theory, that made the hairy-root technique an efficient method for producing high-value metabolites that are hard to synthesize. Our goal was to produce “super ginseng” with enhanced levels of active metabolites. I reconnected with my mentor Neil Towers and the lab at UBC to help us carry out a pilot study. We discovered the high-tech methods cost too much compared to just growing ginseng the old-fashioned way, and the project was dropped. I left the company in 1998 when it decided the real money lay in sports supplements. Since those were made up almost entirely of synthetic ingredients, there wasn’t much reason for a plant guy to stick around.

I made a good living for the next couple of years as an independent consultant. More important than the money, I learned, was having control over my time. Business was good. Kava kava, the Polynesian anxiolytic beverage, was becoming quite popular, and there was keen interest in creating drinks that incorporated a dose of kava for relaxation and as a social lubricant. Many Hawaii farmers saw kava as the next big cash crop, reviving a local economy that had been sluggish since the sugarcane market collapsed decades earlier. I consulted for a company that was starting work on what is known as a supercritical extraction plant on the Big Island for kava and other organic biomaterials. Meanwhile, another client had ties to a large ranch on the island of Molokai that had begun committing many acres to kava cultivation. That led to a modest grant through the Heffter Research Institute to characterize the “chemotypes” of the recognized varieties of Hawaiian kava, or “awa” as it is called there. The study was somewhat outside the Heffter’s mission scope, but we undertook it, given that the research concerned the ethnobotany of a culturally important psychoactive plant. The result, published in 1999, was the first detailed investigation of the chemistry and morphological diversity of “awa” in Hawaii (Lebot et al., 1999).

Back on the mainland, I worked with a startup company, Pharmanex, whose founders were developing a line of high-quality supplements to be sold through pharmacies. My job was to produce scientific write-ups on each product as part of an effort to educate pharmacists about herbal supplements, a big project I finished with the help of two colleagues, medical writer Kenneth Jones and ethnobotanist Kerry Hughes. Pharmanex published the work as a desktop reference, but by then the firm had been acquired by Nu Skin Enterprises, a larger company whose direct-sales strategy had no role for pharmacists, much less a book to inform them. Our orphaned text eventually caught the attention of Haworth Herbal Press, which published an updated edition as
Botanical Medicines: The Desk Reference for Major Herbal Supplements
in 2002. I went on to serve as editor in chief of Haworth Herbal Press until the imprint was discontinued after the sale of its parent, Haworth Press, to Taylor and Francis in 2007.

So that’s a sketch of my career through the 1990s. Looking back, I’d say my experiences at Aveda, and earlier at Shaman, were quite valuable and have colored my perspective ever since. I realized I didn’t work well in a corporate structure, subject to someone else’s idea of how best to use my time. I did better work as a consultant, and most of my subsequent forays into the corporate world would be in that capacity. Since 2001, I’ve served as an adjunct assistant professor at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In recent years, I’ve also taught summer field courses for pharmacy students in Ecuador and Peru. I’ve mentioned how lucky I was to encounter talented mentors and teachers whose love of plants was a gift they were driven to share with their students. I’m grateful now for the chance I have to impart my love of the natural world in turn.

Chapter 48 - The Bard in Light and Shadow

Terence (Photo by J. Wagner)

It’s been more than thirty years since that rainy Monday in April 1981 when Terence packed up seeds and gear and said goodbye to me at the airport in Iquitos. While our farewells were temporary, my sadness at the time said otherwise. On some level, I knew the occasion marked a pivotal transition for us, and I think he felt the same. Over the decades ahead, we’d be caught up in the same relentless flow of time that carries every being toward its separate fate. There would always be something akin to quantum entanglement between us, at least binding our minds. Though we saw each other frequently and remained in close touch over the ensuing decades, the vicissitudes of life largely kept us focused on our own separate tracks.

While I’d been finishing my thesis in Vancouver and working through various postdocs, building a scientific career and raising a daughter in a new hometown, Terence had been striking off in new directions of his own. He had abandoned plans for an academic career and, publicly at least, had rejected science or any other sort of conventional professional identity. Always a maverick, he eschewed anything like a “real job.” Fortunately, he was clever and talented enough not to need one. Like Marshall McLuhan, another contemporary maverick that we both admired, Terence was able to carve out a unique place at the table in the ongoing cultural conversation.

During the eighties, interest grew in the philosophical ideas and peculiar notions that Terence espoused. The books we had coauthored,
The Invisible Landscape
and
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
, were important early texts in that regard. The former exposed readers to a mind-stretching plethora of odd but appealing ideas, and the latter gave them a do-it-yourself method for visiting the realms we postulated if they wanted to try it at home.

Over time, Terence used his talents as a charismatic lecturer and raconteur to develop a devoted following. He became closely identified with mushrooms and the peculiar ideas associated with them, and discussed them openly in his ever-more-frequent radio interviews and public appearances. Even though mushrooms themselves were illegal, there was no law against talking about them, and Terence’s open advocacy of the psychedelic experience was reminiscent of Leary’s, another Irish gadfly who, in his prime, had used psychedelics to poke a stick in the eye of an uptight establishment. During the Reagan era and the Just-Say-No phase of the War on Drugs, Terence’s message got under the skin of many of the more humorless arbiters of morality and cultural correctness. He always had a gift for the provocative statement, and for him to put himself out there as the chief advocate of psychedelic gnosis when no one else was doing so took some courage.

Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; they’re suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. That’s no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life. Mushrooms have a way of inoculating the mind against the kind of thought control the prevailing order in any age needs to sustain itself. I’m not naively suggesting that the work of building a better world stops with the psychedelic experience. But it could be where it begins, or is renewed—in the moment of freedom when one glimpses the transient nature of reality and its ever-present potential for change.

Terence, by example, gave people permission to explore consciousness, to think, and to entertain new ideas. He reminded his listeners that it’s fun to exercise the imagination; astonishment and wonder awaken our desires to look inwardly at who we are and outwardly at the marvelous universe we inhabit. No matter how much we come to understand, there will always be infinitely more to be understood. One of Terence’s favorite quotes was from the English geneticist J.B.S. Haldane: “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can
suppose.” Terence reveled in that insight. The fact is that “funny ideas,” no matter how strange, play a crucial role in enticing us beyond the perimeters of the imaginable. As a leading, late-twentieth-century advocate of funny ideas, Terence deserves credit for leaving the scope of what we can suppose just a bit wider than he found it.