Psychedelics
Early in his career as a physician, psychiatrist, and brain researcher Dr. Naranjo was active in exploring the psychoactive effects of various families of pharmaceuticals and plant extracts.
In the early 1960s, he was the first to investigate the effects of the harmal alkaloids in an urban setting. He was also the first to introduce a form of "Pharmahuasca" into clinical use and demonstrated the psychoactive effects of 10-methoxy-harmalan, which had by then been discovered to be a pineal metabolite.
Dr. Naranjo was also the first to describe the hallucinogenic effects of ibogaine in volunteers and to engage in clinical experimentation with the Tabernanthe Iboga extract.
In collaboration with Alexander Shulgin, he conducted psychopharmacological research and clinical testing of a number of phenethilamines, beginning with MDA. This work resulted in the discovery of a kind of psychoactive drug previously unknown, which he called "feeling enhancer" or "feeling optimizer"--today more commonly known as "entactogens" or "empathogens".
Dr. Naranjo's earliest report on his harmaline research was presented at the Kroeber Anthropological society in Berkeley in 1965 and then published by Harner in Hallucinogens and Shamanism. The Healing Journey, published by Pantheon Books in 1974, describes his clinical explorations of MDA MMDA, Harmaline and Ibogaine; His chapter in Benjamin Wolman's Handbook of Altered States of Consciousness approaches psychedelics from the perspective of a taxonomy of the states of consciousness that they may induce, and his contribution to the Yearbook of World Problems and Human Potencial deals with the interpretation of psychedelic experience in light of meditation. His chapter Researching The Vine of the Soul, published in edition #22 of Fate, describing his work with yagé has been in circulation for years.
Filmed by Louis Edelsheim - Berkeley: January 2002
04 minutes, 05 seconds
 Psychedelic Experience in Light of the Psychology of Meditation from Yearbook of Cross-Cultural Medicine and Psychotherapy, 1995 |