Photo by Linda Dear

What do you do when you find a bluish lump of fungus previously unknown to science, growing in your petri dish? If you’re Steven Pollock, you eat it, call your friend, and tell him you’ve discovered the one thing that’s eluded men of obscurity for millennia. I am talking of course about the philosopher’s stone—key to the universe—elixir of life—the ultimate essence of all things. In suburban San Antonio of all places. But there’s one quality the Ancients forgot—it gets you really, really high.¹

On first blush, mad scientists and mushrooms don’t appear to have much in common. Mad scientists are reason’s burnt offering to the gods of insanity—twisted caricatures of own hubris, doomed eternally to hollows of our brains.

Mushrooms are a tasty food.

But there is a darkness within the mushroom. An evil that, if left unchecked, can consume the very person that tries to eat it.

Yes they may look cute all bunched up in the produce aisle. But don’t be a fool. The wrong mushroom can kill you. Once you’re dead, others still feast off your flesh. They can warp your mind into insanity. And, in the case of 1970s physician and mycologist Steven Pollock—they can even get you murdered.²

What’s a mycologist? You ask slack-jawed. Loosely put, mycologists study fungi. I say loosely because fungi have found their way into literally every realm of human experience. From pretentious Italian cookery to cancer treatment in canines to obscure tribal ritual, you’d be hard pressed to find anything that mycologists don’t stick their noses in. Noses which, like most parts of the human body, are covered in hungrily munching fungal colonies.³

You might be surprised to know that much of what we cherish and hold dear are in fact mushrooms. Ethnomycologist James Arthur has boldly declared that Santa Claus is a mushroom clad stoned shaman from Siberia.⁴ John Allegro argues that Jesus Christ himself, despite appearances, was in fact a mushroom sacrament, ingested by a secret Judaic fertility cult whose scripture inadvertently gave rise to modern Christianity.⁵

Pollock believed that many modern medical treatments could effectively be replaced by mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms to be precise.⁶ While his facial hair suggests a nudist colony off the Puget Sound, or maybe even an obscure Ben and Jerry’s flavor made with beard chunks and thick-rimmed glasses, the San Antonio based doctor had his sights set firmly on the mainstream medical establishment.

By the late 70s, natural medicine was quickly going mainstream, and there are few natural medical compounds more psychoactive than psilocybin, shroom’s active ingredient.

Does this red and white mushroom account for the origins of Santa Claus?

With medical marijuana gaining a grudging legal acceptance, Pollock believed it was only a matter of time before Uncle Sam would wise up to the benefits of medical mushrooms. And when he did, the doctor would be first to the party, satchel of Psilocybin ℞ in one hand, a bestselling hardcover in the other.

He wrote extensively in publications like the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs on the potential of shrooms to treat illness and improve overall life quality.^6,7,8 And yes the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs is a real scientific journal—you have to respect a publication that lets a sentence like, “I felt as if I were perceiving stimuli traveling through multifocal space warps,”⁹ go to print.

At the same time, Pollock drew up plans for a multimillion dollar mushroom research center to conduct his own clinical studies.¹ A facility that he hoped to finance, naturally, with magic mushrooms.¹

Under the name Hidden Creek, “the magic mushroom people who are forever keeping your mind in mind,” Pollock sold ready-made magic mushroom grow kits in the back pages of High Times.¹⁰ His unrivaled cultivation skills and bizarre marketing acumen gave magazine readers such evocative products as Hawaiian Cyan, The Cosmic Camote, and Penis Envy (the latter bred specifically to look like a penis).^{10, 11}

The whole thing was actually legit. Magic mushroom spores don’t contain any psychoactive compounds, so not technically illegal to sell them. Of course, you’ll need plenty of mushrooms to create the spores. Which explains why Pollock had, according to one source, “the world’s largest collection of psychedelic mushrooms.”² After his murder police seized 1,758 jars of mushrooms and growing mediums from his modest ranch-style suburban home.²

Hidden Creek was a considerable success,¹ thanks largely to Pollock’s relentless obsession. According to his girlfriend, “We hardly ever went out…Our dates were spent shaking mushroom jars early into the morning, and the sex was often interrupted by technical raps about mushrooms.”²

But still, grow kits weren’t raising the kind of money needed to finance Pollock’s vision. So the good doctor turned to the next best thing—selling narcotic prescriptions for cash out of his home.²

Now here’s where things get really hairy. It seems Pollock’s erratic behavior was quickly pissing off a whole lot of people. Friends and colleagues broke contact.¹ Five separate government agencies took an interest in his activities.² And it didn’t help that he started a cannabis plantation, prescribed Dexedrine to two undercover cops, and purchased a pharmacy to fill his own ‘scrips.¹

Pollock's notorious Penis Envy strain

What we do is that Steven Pollock was shot dead “execution style” in his house on January 31st, 1981.²

I won’t go into the details of Pollock’s brutal murder, which to this day remains a mystery. Was it just a simple robbery as police claim? Or was it a clandestine coup aimed to keep psychedelics out of the medical establishment. You can check out Hamilton Morris’s excellent article in Harpers for more info on the crime itself. Suffice to say there’s enough conspiracy to make your propeller beanie whiz uncontrollably in alarm, with unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay stretching all the way up to the big Texan himself—Ross Perot.¹

“Had Steve worn a tie, had short hair, worked under a government grant at Harvard and sold prescriptions to suburbanites,” colleague Kenneth Blum attests, “He would still be alive today.”² If so, would Pollock’s dream of a mushroom stocked pharmacy on every main street have come to pass?

Thirty-plus years later, and medicinal magic mushrooms still just sound funny, despite psilocybin’s promise in the treatment of anything from obsessive compulsive disorder, to cigarette addition, to headaches. But Pollock’s philosopher’s stone fungus (P. Tampenensis)¹¹ lives on, in the Netherlands of all places, where thanks to a legal loophole it is widely sold under the less arcane moniker, Magic Truffles.¹

True mad science after all is never eradicated. Just when you think history has blotted out any last trace, it pops up in the shelves of an Amsterdam smart shop.

From a '79 issue of High Times.

Sources:
1. Morris, M. (2013, July). Blood spore: Of murder and mushrooms. Harper’s Magazine, 41 – 56. Retrieved from: http://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/blood-spore/
2. Fellner, M. (1980). ’Shroom king slain in his San Antonio home. High Times.
3. Krom, B. P., Kidwai, S., ten Cate, J. M. (2014). Candida and other fungal species: Forgotten players of healthy oral microbiota. Journal of Dental Research, 93(5), 445 – 451.
4. Arthur, J. (2003). Mushrooms and mankind: The impact of mushrooms on human consciousness and religion. San Diego, California: The Book Tree.
5. Allegro, J. M. (1970). The sacred mushroom and the cross. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
6. Pollock, S. H. (1976). Psilocybin mycetismus with a special reference to the Panaeolus. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 8(1), 43 – 57.
7. Pollock, S. H. (1975). The Psilocybin Mushroom Pandemic. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 7(1), 73 – 84.
8. Pollock, S. H. (1976). Liberty caps: Recreational hallucinogenic mushrooms. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1(6), 445 – 447.
9. Pollock, S. H. (1974). A case study from Hawaii. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 6(1), 85 – 89.
10. Hidden Creek [advertisement]. (1979). High Times. Retrieved From: http://www.mushroomjohn.org/cult150.html
11. Morris, M. (2009). A nice, thick, uncut, 12-inch shroom. Vice Magazine, 16(2). Retrieved from: http://www.vice.com/print/12-inch-shroom-603-v16n2
12. Guzmán, G., & Pollock, S. H. (1978). A new bluing species of psilocybe from Florida, U.S.A. Mycotaxon, 7(2), 373 – 376.

The post Mad Scientist #18: Steven H. Pollock appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

This was not an isolated incident. Countless animals have been drugged with hallucinogens in the name of science. Everything from cats² and rats³ to snails⁴ and goats have had their doors of perception unwittingly flung open in the quest to answer one of [stoned] man’s most basic questions: What are our pets like high?

Thanks to German pharmacologist Peter N. Witt, we’ve even drugged spiders.

Spiders on weed

Why spiders? What could a creature whose brain fits comfortably on the head of a pin possibly tell us about our own psychology?

A spider can’t talk. And even if it could talk, I don’t think I’d want to hear what it has to say.

Spiders are really only good at one thing, spinning webs.

You can launch a spider into space,⁵ zap its central nervous system with a high powered laser,⁶ or pump it full of goofballs⁷ (N.B. Peter Witt did all these things) and it will still build a web. It will even spin one after multiple limbs have been chopped off.⁸ Of course, the webs they weave will be horribly disfigured—tortured windows into a shattered psyche—but that’s all the fun!

By measuring drug-induced changes in web creation, scientists are able to study drug behavior without having to put up with its most annoying, uncontrollable side-effect: stoned people.

Spiders on caffeine

And it turns out there are some freaky similarities between high spiders and ourselves. For starters, drugs that are relatively more potent in humans tend to be more potent in spiders too.⁷ So acid gets spiders more messed up than shrooms, just like us.

Web builders on weed are mysteriously sidetracked before they even make it to the outer portion of their spiral.⁹ Spiders on mushrooms and peyote build webs as if they literally weighed more, which matches the sensation of heaviness felt by many human users.¹⁰

But it gets weirder. Spiders actually weave more geometrically perfect webs on LSD than they do sober.⁷ And can you guess which drug leads to the most hideously deformed web structure? Caffeine.¹¹

Spiders on LSD

If you’re wondering just how Witt coaxed spiders into hitting up bongs and downing cups of coffee, it wasn’t peer pressure. Witt’s team used a variety of methods, including injecting the drugs directly into a fly’s butt, where the spider is wont to “tap the juices.”⁹

It’s very tempting for us to take what we know about stoned people and apply it do stoned spiders. Witt’s research doesn’t really dissuade us from this. He does a great job describing and classifying drug behavior in spiders, but admittedly offers little insight into the mechanisms behind this behavior.¹¹

Is it really stoned apathy that causes baked spiders to space out? Or cosmic enlightenment that makes tripping spiders realize their fractal glory? Without any real explanation, it’s hard to say the similarities between spiders and man are anything more than trippy.

Spiders on peyote

Still, research boldly forged deeper into this unholy nexus of narcotics, arachnids, and insanity. Other researchers more obscure, and, we may assume, madder than Witt, substituted drugs with blood and urine from schizophrenics.^12,13 After all, LSD is potent at almost imperceptibly small doses. Some psychiatrists began to wonder if there was another similarly inconspicuous psychochemical at work in the bodies of severely deranged mental patients.¹¹ If it so far had eluded conventional detection, could we suss it out with spiders?

Spiders on phenobarbital (aka goofballs)

Contamination with schizophrenic bodily fluids was previously shown to be toxic to doves and tadpoles.¹³ It even produced catatonic behavior when injected into the brains of monkeys.¹³ Still, the effects of psychotic blood and urine on spiders were inconclusive.¹¹ One American researcher found that blood from catatonic schizophrenics caused spiders to briefly stop building webs altogether.¹³ But overall the results were unconvincing.¹¹ Thankfully we don’t have to worry about schizophrenic pee becoming a street drug anytime soon.

Anyways back to what we were talking about. Spiders on drugs—are they really stoned, or are we whacked out for even thinking that? You may be skeptical, but before you throw out the baby with the bong water, keep in mind that insects are already capable of some crazy intelligent things, like farming crops¹⁴ and constructing cemeteries.¹⁵ If insects can do smart stuff that we thought only we could do, who’s to say they can’t share in the dumber side of the human experience and get high too?

A normal spider web

Sources:
1. West, L. J., Pierce, C. M., & Thomas, W. D. (1962). Lysergic acid diethylamide: Its effects on a male asiatic elephant. Science, 138(3545), 1100-1103.
2. Barratt, E. S., & Pray, S. L. (1965). Effect of a chemically depressed amygdala on the behavioral manifestations produced in cats by LSD-25. Experimental Neurology, 12(2), 173-178.
3. Geyer, M. A., & Light, R. K. (1979). LSD-Induced Alterations of Investigatory Responding in Rats. Psychopharmacology, 65, 41-47.
4. Abramson, H. A., & Jarvik, M. E. (1955). Lysergic acid diethylamide (Lsd-25): Ix. Effect on snails. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, 40(2), 337-340.
5. Witt, P. N., Scarboro, M. B., Daniels, R., Peakall, D. B., & Gause, R. L. (1976). Spider web-building in outer space: evaluation of records from the Skylab spider. Journal of Arachnology, 4(2), 115-124.
6. Witt, P. N., Reed, C. F., & Tittel, F. K. (1964). Laser lesions and spider web construction. Nature, 201(4915), 150-152.
7. Witt, P. N. (1971). Drugs alter web-building of spiders: A review and evaluation. Behavoiral Science, 16(1), 98-113.
8. Witt, P. N., & Reed, C. F. (1965). Spider-web building. Science, 149(3689), 1190-1197.
9. Witt, P. N. (1954). Spider webs and drugs. Scientific American, 191, 80-86.
10. Christiansen, A., Baum, R., & Witt, P. N. (1962). Changes in spider webs brought about by mescaline, psilocybin and an increase in body weight. The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 136, 31-37.
11. Witt, P. N., Reed, C. F., & Peakall, D. B. (1968). A spider’s web. Problems in regulatory biology. New York: Springer-Verlag.
12. Rieder, H. P. (1957). Biological determination of toxicity of pathologic body fluids. III. Examination of urinary extracts of mental patients with the help of the spider web test. Psychiatria et neurologia, 134(6), 378-396.
13. Bercel, N. A. (1960). A study of the influence of schizophrenic serum on the behavior of the spider Zilla-x-notata. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2, 189-209.
14. Mueller, U. G., & Gerardo, N. (2002). Fungus-farming insects: Multiple origins and diverse evolutionary histories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(24), 15247-15249.
15. Martin, M., Chopard, B., & Albuquerque, P. (2002). Formation of an ant cemetery: swarm intelligence or statistical accident? Future Generation Computer Systems, 18(7), 951-959.

The post Mad Scientist #15: Peter N. Witt appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Trepanation, the act of drilling a hole into one’s skull, has its roots in the mystical/therapeutic practices of prehistoric civilization. Archaeologists have unearthed trepanned bone fragments in every continent except Antarctica, with some samples dating as far back as 10,000 BC.¹

Greek physicians like Hippocrates performed trepanations in cases where traumatic head trauma had damaged a patient’s skull.²

In the days before suction and lighting, trepanations were performed outdoors, in the sun, with the patient sitting upright.

The Roman surgical pioneer Galen used the procedure to relieve intracranial pressure caused by brain hemorrhaging.² A similar surgery is still controversially employed today under the term “craniectomy.”³

Huges, however, did not drill a hole in his head to relieve any acute physical trauma. He was, from a purely physiological standpoint, healthy. So was his disciple Joe Mellen, who chronicled his own self-trepanning experience in the autobiography “Bore Hole.” So was Joe’s wife, Amanda Fielding, whose trepanation was the subject of the terrifying short film, “Heartbeat and the Brain.”

Their desire to crack into their own skull was born out of a longing to restore their mind’s youthful vitality.

After all, we’re all born with holes in our head. Evolution has sectioned the infant skull into a series of jointed plates, so we can flex and squeeze our heads through mom’s narrow birth canal.

Soft spots on the head (called fontanels) visibly throb to the baby’s heartbeat, revealing cavities where bone has yet to form. As we mature, these fontanels close up. Our mind loses its pulsating vitality, Huges claims, as precious blood is literally squeezed out.⁴ Our brain suffocates inside our own skull!

Fuck guys we're cool.

Huges and his "revolutionary" scroll.

Photos by Cor Jaring.

Since intracranial pressure in a healthy adult is between 7-15mmHg⁵, and atmospheric pressure is around 760mmHg, Huges theorized that cutting a hole in his skull would raise the pressure inside his head. This in turn, would squeeze out a portion of the brain’s cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), thus increasing what he termed “brainbloodvolume,” or the ratio of blood to CSF in the head.⁶

Greater brainbloodvolume means more oxygen to the brain. More oxygen means more brainpower, more mental energy, and a faster cerebral metabolism.⁷

Similar benefits could be achieved by standing on one’s head, which Huges’ claims his father did every morning—“to keep fit.”⁶

Trepanning equipment from back in the day.

Psychoactive drugs can also dramatically speed up the brain’s metabolism, though the effects wear off quickly.⁷ Huges promoted the use of “psychovitamins” like pot and LSD (guy named his daughter Maria Juana).⁶ But he cautioned that massive increases in brainbloodvolume necessitated the ingestion of massive quantities of glucose. For an ordinary acid trip, the recommended dosage is no less than a pound of sugar!⁶

All this making sense so far? Huges was surprised by the profoundly negative reaction many scientists and journalists had to his work, which was first published on a scroll entitled “Homo Sapiens Correctus” (brief note for aspiring mad scientists: if you want to convince skeptical academics of a revolutionary theory, it’s probably best not to reveal your findings in scroll form).

He believed the mark he bore on his forehead was the herald of a revolution. “Gravity is the enemy. The adult is its victim – society is its disease…I think that no construction of adults can work optimally unless each adult in the construction is trepanned.”⁶

Amanda Feilding campaign poster

Unsurprisingly, Huges convinced few to follow him on this oddly brutal path towards hippie enlightenment. But the supporters he did gather were extremely devoted to the cause. Amanda Fielding twice ran for British Parliament on the platform that trepanation should be freely available for all citizens. She got 139 votes in her local district in 1983.⁸ Peter Halvorson founded the International Trepanation Advocacy Group (ITAG), which promotes scientific research into the benefits of the procedure.⁹

Most neuroscientists will tell you, out of no animosity towards Huges, that his theory is total bunk. That’s right you heard me—BUNK! It’s blood flow not blood volume that is implicated in brain function.⁹ And, according to associate professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston J. Bob Blacklock, “there is no reason to believe drilling a hole in the head will increase blood flow to the brain.”⁹

However, in the spirit of anti-skepticism that this blog is, I guess, founded on, I should note that there is some apparently scientific support for Huges’ theory. In a study funded by the ITAG (translated pdf here), and published in Fiziologiya Cheloveka (which as far as I can tell is a real sciencey-type journal), researchers found that trepanned skulls did experience an increase in intracranial blood volume “during systolic elevation of arterial pressure increases” (i.e. they throbbed viscerally during heartbeats).¹⁰

Take it with a grain of salt…or a pound of sugar. Whether the theory’s true or false doesn’t make it any less insane. Huges, as an unlicensed, amateur science blogger, it’s my solemn duty the bestow upon you a most grave diagnosis: incurable science-madness!

1. Kim, D.J. (2004). The appeal of holes in the head. W.A. Whitelaw (Ed.), Proceedings of the 13th Annual History of Medicine Days, 17-24.
2. Missios, S. (2007). Hippocrates, Galen, and the uses of trepanation in the ancient classical world. Neurosurgical Focus, 23(1):E:11, 1-9.
3. Kudo, H., Kawaguchi, T., Minami, H., Kuwamura, K., Miyata, M., Kohmura, E. (2007). Controversy of Surgical Treatement for Severe Cerebellar Infarction. Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases, 16(6), 259-262.
4. Mitchell, J. (1999). Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions. Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press.
5. Steiner, L.A., Andrews, P.J.D. (2006). Monitoring the injured brain: ICP and CBF. British Journal of Anaesthesia, 97(1), 26-38.
6. Mellen, J. (1966-1967, Winter). The hole to luck – interview with famous self-trepanner Dr. Bart Huges as questioned by Joe Mellen. The Transatlantic Review, 23. (It’s worth a read: http://lundissimo.info/docs/trep/luck_hole.html)
7. Mellen, J. (n.d.) Mind at large – the mechanism of brainbloodvolume. Retreived Jan 7, 2011, from http://joemellen.net/brainbloodvolume.html
8. Turner, C. (2007-2008, Winter). Like a hole in the head. Cabinet, 28. (url: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/turner.php)
9. Colton, M. (1998, May 31). You need it like…a hole in the head. The Washington Post. (url: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/trepan.htm)
10. Moskalenko, Y.E., Weinstein, G.B., Kravchenko, T.I., Mozhaev, S.V., Semernya, V.N., Feilding, A., Halvorson, P., Medvedev, S.V. (2009). The effect of craniotomy on the intracranial hemodynamics and cerebrospinal fluid dynamics in humans. Fiziologiya Cheloveka, 34(3), 41-48.

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