CHAPTER THREE CANNABIS (SPP.) AND NUTMEG DERIVATIVES

With upward of a hundred species thus far botanically and chemically identified in the psychoactive pharmacopoeia of different peoples of the world, the great majority of them in the Americas, it is nonetheless a fact that there are many more potential hallucinogens in the plant kingdom than have ever been discovered or utilized. The plant world is so enormous that not even all its members have been classified, with estimates ranging up to 800,000 for the total number of species in the floras of the two hemispheres. The hallucinogens among them are concentrated mainly in two families: (1) The fungi—from the primitive Claviceps, the ergot parasite of rye and other Old World grasses, to the sacred mushrooms of Mesoamerican Indians and the spectacularly beautiful Amanita muscaria, or fly-agaric, of Eurasian shamanism. (2) The angiosperms, that vast family of plants whose seeds are enclosed in an ovary. In contrast, the gymnosperms, comprising seed plants with naked seeds not enclosed in an ovary (such as the conifers); ferns; lichens; algae; bacteria; and bryophytes (nonflowering plants with rhizoids instead of true roots, comprising the mosses and liverworts), all seem to be lacking in psychedelically active members (Schultes, 1972a).

The hallucinogenic properties themselves can be ascribed to two broad groups—nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous (i.e. lacking a nitrogen atom). Of these two groups, the former, comprising mainly alkaloids closely related to the amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and derived in their majority from the indolic amino acid tryptophane, plays by far the greater role. Among these alkaloids, the tryptamines are the most important hallucinogens (Schultes, 1970, 1972a). Interestingly enough, the nitrogenous compounds are cosmopolitan while the non-nitrogenous compounds, classified into two main divisions, the dypenzopyrans, which include the cannabinols in marihuana and hashish (Cannabis spp.), and the phenylpropenes, found in nutmeg (Myristica fragrans), are strictly Old World. There is still a third group, comprising the alcohols, but these are beyond the scope of this book, even though alcohol is of course a drug and is in fact widely employed for ritual intoxication, rather like the vegetal hallucinogens.*

Cannabis spp.

The literature on the hemp plant, Cannabis, scientific and popular, is such that we need hardly add to it here. Also, strictly speaking, its best-known modern product, marihuana, the "new social drug," is not a psychedelic but an euphoriant. But there is some significant new information on the genus Cannabis that has not been widely disseminated. Moreover, the active principles of Cannabis are perfectly capable of psychedelic effect, and have been so used through history, especially in Asia, probably long before hemp fiber began to assume economic importance.

A New Finding: Three Species of Cannabis

"Spp." is the conventional abbreviation for species in the plural. It may come as something of a surprise that contrary to conventional wisdom Cannabis should be treated as a multispecies genus rather than as a single species, Cannabis sativa L., with several geographical or ecological varieties (e.g. C. mexicana , C. americana [gigantea], and C. indica) but not separate species. In this I follow a new determination by Schultes and his colleagues (1974: 337-360), who have now accepted as correct the findings of Russian plant geneticists in the 1920's and 1930's that Cannabis sativa is not alone but is only one of three separate species, the others being C. indica and C. ruderalis. This differentiation is by no means an idle taxonomical exercise, of significance only to a handful of botanists and plant taxonomists. As Schultes and his coworkers point out, considering the great economic and therapeutic importance of this multipurpose plant to man since he first cultivated it perhaps as much as 10,000 years ago, and the fact that the drug it yields continues to be the focus of considerable controversy as well as medical experimentation, the time "is long overdue when a full study of Cannabis taxonomy must be initiated" (p. 357). Moreover, there is an intriguing legal aspect: much marihuana legislation, not only in the United States but, largely because of American pressure, in other countries as well, is based precisely on the single-species theory which Schultes and his colleagues now reject as scientifically untenable.

That there is considerable variability in the strength of marihuana and other preparations of Cannabis has long been generally known, to scientists as well as social users. A variety of factors, particularly environmental ones, are usually cited to account for the phenomenon. But Schultes et al. have become convinced that there are, in fact, significant chemical differences between different species,

... not only in the cannabinolic content but in other constituents, such as the essential oils, flavonoids and possibly several other classes of secondary compounds. Lamarck suggested as early as 1783 that the content of the intoxicating principle was higher in Cannabis indica than in C. sativa. In the intervening 200 years, during which the epithet indica has been used, there has usually been the inference that it is a more strongly intoxicating form of Cannabis. Unfortunately, however, almost no chemical studies have been made in association with taxonomic studies nor on the basis of voucher specimens. Throughout the modern Russian literature there exists the inference, if not outright claim, that the cannabinolic content of Cannabis indica is higher than that of C. saliva and C. ruderalis. Pertinent to species differentiation on a chemical basis may be the unexpected, recent discovery, made independently by several workers, that chemical differences in Cannabis appear to be based more on a genetic basis than on environmental or edaphic factors. If this be so, then it may add still another argument for specific differentiation in the genus. (Schultes et al., 1974:354-355)

Whatever the final taxonomic and phytochemical determinations, Cannabis, whose original home is somewhere in central Asia, where its only truly wild representatives can now be found and from where it diffused in early times to other parts of the Old World—and after the Conquest, to the New World as well—is today adapted to almost all inhabited parts of the globe, and virtually all climates, either as cultivated plants or as weeds that escaped from cultivation. The literary, folkloric, historical, and archaeological evidence for its use in ancient medicine and as a ritual intoxicant is extensive, beginning with what is generally believed to be the earliest reference to the therapeutic value of Cannabis in a Chinese treatise on pharmacology attributed to the legendary emperor Shen Nung and said to date from 2737 B.C. (cf. Brecher et al., 1972; Emboden, 1972a). Cannabis actually had a wide variety of medical uses in the United States between 1850 and 1937; it was listed as a recognized medicinal drug in the United States Pharmacopoeia until 1942 and is still so included in its British counterpart. Largely because of public or official hysteria over recreational marihuana use, medical demand for Cannabis extracts was until recently very low, but beginning in 1971 there has been a sharp upturn in experimental use of Cannabis as medication for a variety of disorders, including alcoholism, heroin and amphetamine dependence, emotional disturbance, and even glaucoma. (See Brecher et al., 1972.)

Nutmeg

Nutmeg, like mace a product of the fruit of the nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, has long been a popular spice—and historically, an important medicament in Asia, the Near East, and Europe—of which the United States alone consumes between five and six million pounds a year, mainly as a food flavoring in baking and cooking. It is used especially in doughnuts, and around Christmas time there is always a marked upsurge in its popularity as a savory ingredient in eggnog and hot toddy.

Less well-known perhaps is the fact that in large doses nutmeg acts on the central nervous system as an hallucinogenic intoxicant, though, let it be said at once, with bizarre physical and mental symptoms and with such distinctly unpleasant after-effects as extreme nausea, headache, dizziness, and dryness of the nose and throat. The psychoactive properties of nutmeg, which have been noted by physicians since early times, present a whole series of interesting cultural and psychopharmacological problems, especially since two of its essential oils, safrol and myristicin, are the basis of two synthetic drugs, MDA and MMDA, amphetamine derivatives that have become important in psychotherapy.

The ancient world is full of tales of nutmeg as a narcotic medicament with wondrous healing properties for a great variety of ailments, from kidney disease to chronic irritability to impotence. Unfortunately, as Weil (1967), who made a study of experimentation with nutmeg intoxication among students and United States prison populations* has noted, reliable historical data on nutmeg's being deliberately used as a psychoactive agent are hard to come by, although there are a number of early accounts of the effects of nutmeg intoxication, and the nutmeg is specifically referred to as a "narcotic fruit" in the Ashur Veda, an early Hindu work dealing with medicine and the prolongation of human life.

Nutmeg in European Medicine

Nutmeg achieved great importance in European medicine in the Middle Ages, but it was apparently unknown to the Greeks and Romans. In fact, it does not seem to have reached Europe until the first centuries of the Christian era, presumably through the agency of Arabian spice traders. Arab physicians set down its numerous therapeutic applications as early as the seventh century, but in Europe it is nowhere mentioned in literature until the twelfth century, and its source, the Banda (Nutmeg) Islands in the East Indies, was to remain unknown until the Portuguese reached them in 1512. It is not generally realized that early exploration by the Portuguese and their European rivals was largely spurred by the search for nutmeg and other precious spices of the Orient, which in those days were much sought after not as condiments but as medicines, among them narcotics and aphrodisiacs as well as panaceas. Nutmeg was, in fact, widely regarded as an effective aphrodisiac and still enjoys that reputation in the Near East, where Yemenite men take it to enhance potency. It is also still very much a part of the popular pharmacopoeias of Malaysia and India, where it is prescribed for such ills as heart trouble, intestinal disorders, kidney disease, and even irritability in children.

In European medicine nutmeg achieved its greatest fame in the 1700's, but with the advent of modern medicine its popularity gradually diminished—until in the late nineteenth century it made a sudden and dramatic comeback with a veritable epidemic of nutmeg intoxication among American and British women who mistakenly thought large doses of the spice could induce overdue menstruation and even abortion. According to Weil, this completely erroneous idea, whose origins are a mystery, occasionally still surfaces in the United States.

Nutmeg and Psychotherapy

The two drugs mentioned above, MDA and MMDA, do not occur in nature. They are the result of amination of the essential oils of nutmeg. If similar processes occur naturally in the human body it would help to explain the subjective effects of nutmeg. MDA (methylene dioxyamphetamine) is an amination product of safrol, and the closely related MMDA (3-methoxy-4 ,5- methylene dioxyphenyl isopropylamine) is a synthetic compound derived from the addition of ammonia to myristicin, the most important primary constituent of nutmeg. Safrol is also present in other spices, most prominently in oil of sassafras, which consists about 80 percent of safrol. In modest quantities sassafras oil serves as a flavoring, in larger doses it has been used as a medicament, and of course sassafras tea has long been widely enjoyed. Neither sassafras oil nor sassafras tea, however, have the reputation of nutmeg as a psychoactive agent (Shulgin et al., 1967).

In a new book, The Healing Journey (1973), the Chilean-born psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo has outlined some of his experiences with MDA- and MMDA-assisted psychotherapy .* Naranjo calls these agents "feeling enhancers," and he differentiates them as psychedelic ("mind-manifesting") agents as distinguished from hallucinogens or psychotomimetics because they do not result in extraordinary perceptual phenomena or depersonalization and do not mimic psychotic states. In psychotherapy, he writes, MDA is valuable because it characteristically induces what is called "age regression," a state in which the patient, while retaining awareness of the present self, vividly reexperiences particular childhood events and is able to verbalize these past experiences far more expressively than is the case with other drugs that have been so used. While he calls MDA the "drug of analysis," capable of returning the patient deep into his troubling past far more quickly than is usual with traditional psychoanalysis and less traumatically than with LSD, MMDA induces ecstatic or peak experiences of the here and now, again without the temporary disintegration of personality and other drastic psychic effects that often accompany the use of LSD in psychotherapy, creating instead

• . . an intensification of feelings, symptoms, and visual imagination rather than a qualitative change thereof. The value of such an intensification in the psychotherapeutic process lies mainly, perhaps, in that clues to the significant issues take more frequently the therapist's and patient's attention than they otherwise would, whereas, in the normal situation, much of the time and effort in a therapeutic process may go into cutting through a veil of verbiage and automatisms that form part of the habitual social role. With MMDA, there is a more prompt access to the patient's underlying experience, or symptoms resulting from its denial and distortion. (p. 122)

*Schultes (1970) mentions an alcohol-containing plant, Lagochilus inebrians, whose leaves and other parts have long been used to brew an intoxicating tea by such peoples of central Asia as the Tajik, Tartar, Turkoman, and Uzbek. A crystalline material called lagochiline, isolated from the plant in 1945, was at first thought to be an alkaloid, but recent studies have shown it to be a polyhydric alcohol.

*Malcolm X, for example, describes his prison experience with nutmeg intoxication in his Autobiography (1964).

*Notwithstanding his enthusiasm for the psychotherapeutic potential of MDA, Naranjo (p. 77) properly sounds this word of caution: MDA has recently proved to be toxic to certain individuals and at varying dose levels; as is true of chloroform, among other drugs, what may be a regular dose to most patients may prove fatal to some. Typical warning signals of MDA are confusion, skin reactions, and profuse sweating. Hence, he writes, compatibility of individual patients must be ascertained with progressively increasing test doses before commencing any therapeutic MDA session.