Nomad Codes

sticks, we removed a few layers of skin from our upper arms, leaving a cluster of small round patches of exposed flesh. (Warned it would leave a scar, I etched the lower half of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life). The Bad Shaman then swabbed on a dab of the goo on the pink skin, and bade us to sit down on his plush couch and prepare ourselves for an intense and potentially nauseating rush. Our host indicated that it was OK to puke on his tile floor, which had already received many a purge.
    Within moments I felt a full volume niacin rush, a blood-pounding vasodilation in the throat and lower head. My throat felt scratchy and hot as the venom raced through my body, shooting tiny bolts of electricity along my arms and descending somewhat ominously to my gut. My body was definitely freaking out, but I maintained a cool mindfulness in the midst of the moderately high flesh panic, as I extracted whatever pleasure can be gained from raw intensity. Wooze hit my gut, though I did not loose my cookies. A host of lightning strikes and hot flashes continued to charge through my system, but in five minutes or so, the blast was basically over. The three of us lingered on the couch for a while longer, sipping Reed’s Ginger Brew and allowing the last cloudbursts of the neural storm to trail off.
    The froggy rocket-ride was weird, and valuable for its novelty alone. I could also sense that at higher doses one would slip into that death rehearsal rag that compels so many envelope-pushing psychonauts. But I was not prepared for the thoroughly excellent if subtle payoff the venom had in store for me over the next few days: a persistently “up” level of energy and mood, but without the edginess of stimulants or the dopey, somewhat plastic cast of Big Pharma mood elevators. Our encounter with the frog venom was only the beginning of a long weekend bacchanal, but even recreational compounds with heavy body loads left me feeling spry and chipper the morning after.
    The Bad Shaman, whose upper arm looked like the cratered afterzone of a teenage acne scourge, loaded us up a day later, allowing me to finish my Kabbalistic tattoo. Though the Bad Shaman promised that the rewards depended on the heaviness of the dose, I still took a moderate amount. But the Bad Shaman blew out the stops for Hatboy, a particularly hard-headed member of our crew. After getting lathered up, he was reduced to a quivering, sweating wreck. The only payoff, he later said, was the immense relief that he did not, in fact, die. The Bad Shaman only smiled. “Maybe you didn’t get enough.”
    2001

PSYCHONAUT

    Say you’re a buttoned-down organic-chemistry jockey at Merck. One day you tweak a molecule ripped off from a Peruvian native medicine, and you wind up with a powerfully psychoactive compound. Instead of squelching anxiety, instilling a reliable boner, or giving your young mind that magic amphetamine edge, the drug helps you touch the hem of God—or at least something a lot like the hem of God. At times it hurtles you into a blazing hieroglyphic phantasmagoria more sublime and gorgeously bizarre than anything on the demo reels of Hollywood FX shops. On other occasions it leads you to the lip of a fundamental insight into the dance of form and emptiness. And though later attempts to communicate your insight founder on the shoals of coherence, the experience still leaves you centered and convinced that ordinary life is fed by deeper springs.
    Now, you think you’d zero in on this molecule, not only as a potential vector into the enigma of consciousness but as the basis for some really interesting commercial drugs. In other words, you’d be psyched. Right?
    No way! It’s common knowledge that such molecules have been recognized and consumed by people for millennia, but have been effectively banished from the scientific mindscape of the West. Despite their mighty psycho-spiritual effects, the potential insight they might provide into the mind, and the largely non-addictive behaviors they elicit, psychedelic drugs like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ketamine, and DMT have been crudely lumped into the same legal and sociocultural categories as speedballs and crank. And one result of this social policy is a withering of the research strategies that a rational civilization is supposed to bring to bear on the conundrums it confronts.
    Despite the continued ferocity of the “war on drugs” and the largely foolish ideas about psychoactive substances it pushes, the last