scores of documents and learned little.
As Jennifer had noted, psychedelic research had begun as an attempt to replicate psychosis, and the articles from the thirties through the fifties were, for the most part, dry treatises, preoccupied with molecular structure and laced with cautious optimism about future benefits to schizophrenia research. I came across Hoffman's description of the synthesis of LSD and other landmark references, but none of them dealt with the issue of premeditated psychological poisoning.
In the sixties the scientific climate changed. I'd been a college student then, too intent on studying to get sidetracked to biochemical recreation. But I remembered how Leary, Alpert, and others had begun to imbue drugs with philosophic, religious, and political properties - and the flood of bandwagon-jumping drug abuse that had ensued when the wrong people listened.
The sixties articles brought back those memories -chronicles of tragedy delivered in the matter-of-fact prose of clinical case histories: bum trippers leaping out of ten-storey windows in spread-eagled flights of Icarian omnipotence, running naked down the freeway, cooking their
arms in vats of boiling water, an orgy of self-destruction.
As psychiatrists and psychologists busied themselves developing treatments for drug poisoning, notions of scientific value vanished. Although the spectre of permanent psychosis in psychologically healthy users was raised, researched, and eventually discarded, hallucinogens were deemed especially dangerous for borderline personalities and others with 'weak ego boundaries'. LSD was the most frequently cited culprit, but there were others as well: amphetamines, barbiturates, and a psychedelic named DMT and labelled the businessman's lunchtime high because it provided a sudden, intense trip of forty-five minutes to two hours.
Two things about DMT caught my eye: Sometimes lunchtime lasted longer than expected - aberrant bad trips had been known to last four or five days - and unlike LSD, its effects were potentiated - intensified - by the administration of Thorazine and other phenothiazine tranquillisers. I remembered Jamey's uneven response to medication, the up-and-down pattern that had puzzled and frustrated Mainwaring, and wondered if potentiation could have caused it. If he'd been poisoned with something like DMT, Thorazine would have made him crazier instead of more lucid. But DMT was too unpredictable for the type of calculated mind control Jennifer had suggested.
I read on and found articles on hashish, psilocybin, mescaline, and a quaint concoction combining both of them with LSD and DMT, known as STP. One piece that intrigued me was a collection of case histories by a research group at the UC San Francisco Medical School, which described STP as 'biochemical Russian roulette' and noted that it had been the party drug of choice for outlaw motorcycle gangs. But that infatuation had been brief, for the cocktail had proved too volatile even for the beasts in leather. Bikers again. I tossed that around for a while, came up with nothing.
A footnote in a 1968 review made note of a drug called Sernyl, a short-term anaesthetic developed by Parke, Davis for field use by the military but abandoned because, when overadministered, it had produced psychiatric symptoms.
Sernyl intoxication could resemble acute schizophrenia, to the point of causing auditory hallucinations. But according to the author of the review, its effects were so frightening - often creating the illusion of death by drowning and other horrors - that he didn't believe it had much potential for abuse. Ten years later Sernyl would be known primarily by its street names - hog, crystal, DOA, angel dust, PCP - and emerge as the main recreational drug of the inner-city ghettos. So much for prophecy.
PCP had been one of the first things I'd thought of after hearing Jamey's garbled speech on the phone and learning about his symptoms, which included some classic PCP reactions: sudden agitation and confusion to the point of violence, paranoia, auditory hallucinations, and a wind-down period of deep depression. PCP could be administered orally, and its effects lasted from hours to weeks. But as with DMT, that range was unpredictable. On top of that, PCP reactions were heavily dose-dependent: Small amounts could cause numbness or euphoria; moderate amounts, analgesia. The psychosis elicited by overdose could progress quickly to coma and death, and the difference between toxic and lethal blood levels was infinitesimal. Which means that a constant diet of PCP could just as easily kill someone as make him crazy. Too volatile to count on in a programme of calculated psychological poisoning.
And there was another problem with PCP, the one I'd raised with Jennifer: Mainwaring had found none of it in Jamey's blood.
If the psychiatrist could be believed.
If he couldn't, what was the alternative? An evil doctor scenario, the healer using his skills to fashion madness? It had surface attractiveness. Solving the problem of dosage calculation; a 'biochemical engineer' could have known how to adjust drug levels with the precision required for mind control. But past that point it fell apart. For Mainwaring had entered the picture long after Jamey had begun deteriorating. And even if he'd been involved before then, what motive could he have to poison his patient?
A discordant collage ran through my mind: punk sculptures, black books, power plants, and bloody bolts of lavender silk. I heard Milo chiding, 'Another conspiracy, pal?' and realised that I'd let the intellectual ruminations of a seventeen-year-old - albeit a brilliant one - rope me into a guessing game.
Intellectual exercises for the idle, I thought, looking at the pile of books before me. A waste of time.
But I continued reading anyway. And proved myself wrong.
I found two promising references. What had seemed at first a perfunctory allusion to psychological poisoning in a Swedish article on chemical warfare led me to the botanical section of the stacks, in search of a monograph by McAllister et al. of Stanford University. But the book was missing. I took the elevator to ground level and went to the front desk on the off chance that it had been checked out and returned but not yet reshelved. The librarian was a husky black quarterback type who spent five minutes computer punching and page flipping before returning, shaking his head.
'Sorry, sir. That hasn't been checked out. Which means it's probably circulating within the library. Sometimes people take their books to the Xerox machines and leave them there.'
I thanked him and searched the area around the machines but didn't find it. Trying to spot a single volume in a place as vast as BioMed made the old needle-in-the-haystack game look easy, so I went looking for my second reference, taking the stairs down to the lowest level of the stacks, four storeys below ground.
I found myself in a musty corner of the basement, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling metal cases jammed with antique volumes - collections deemed marginally relevant to high-tech medicine and sequestered like senile oldsters.
It was a bibliomorgue, silent and dim, the ceiling a tangle of exposed pipes, the walls mildewed and rust- spotted. One of the pipes had sprung a slow drip, and a pool of water had
collected at the base-of one of the cases; some of the books were softened and curled by moisture.
Many of the volumes were foreign: Latin, German, or French. Most were dog-eared. I had to squint to make out faded titles on weathered spines. Finally I found what I was looking for and carried it to a reading cubby.
It was bound in stiff white canvas that time had darkened to cafe au lait, a seventy-year-old volume, the size of an art book, filled with thick pages of elegant type and vellum inserts festooned with hand-coloured engravings. The Taxonomy and Botany of Phantastica and Euphorica: The Products of a Search Among the Primitives for Narcotic Alkaloids by OsgoodShinners-Vree,M.B.E.,A.B., A.M.,Ph.D.,D.Sc, Professor of Botany and Botanical Chemistry, Oxford University, Research Fellow, The British Museum.
I turned to the introduction. The writing was pompous and a tad defensive, as Professor Shinners-Vree attempted to justify a decade of jungle-hopping in search of mind-altering herbs.
'The history of human experimentation with the vegetal environment in order to manipulate the sensoria is as old as Mankind,' he wrote. 'But only in this century has Science developed the techniques to elucidate the chemical properties of the species I have classified phantastica, for the betterment of Mankind. Such benefits lie primarily in the treatment of the dementias and other nervous and mental diseases, but doubtless others will accrue as well.'
The first chapter was a history of witchcraft in medieval Europe. Shinners-Vree's thesis was that witches had been skilled apothecaries who had used their talents for 'unwholesome commerce' - pharmacologic hit women selling their services to the 'less moral members of the Upper Classes'.
Hired by the nobility to poison political and personal enemies, witches concocted brews containing:
Phantasticants of an alkaloid nature including, but not limited to, Black Henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) and the
