QUALITATIVE COMMENTS : (with 1 mg, intravenously, over a three minute period) "Within a minute (from the start of the injection) I had a tight feeling in my chest and my face felt as if it had been jabbed by nettles and this lasted for about 6 minutes. I had fleeting nausea."
(with 2 mg, intravenously, over a 3 minute period) "I felt a tightness in my throat and stomach and it seemed that my pulse was racing, although apparently there was no change in either my pulse or blood pressure."
(with 4 mg, intravenously, over a 3 minute period) "During the injection, I first felt a burning sensation in my face, then a load pressing down from above, and then a numbness of the entire body. I saw red and black spots -- a vivid orange-red -- moving around. Apparently my purplish face color lasted some 15 minutes, well after my visual things had disappeared."
(with 8 mg, intravenously, over a 3 minute period) "I became lightheaded as soon as the injection started, and then my face turned purple and I became nauseated and I felt I couldn't breathe. I see white, straight lines with a black background. I can't trace a pattern. Now there are red, green and yellow dots, very bright like they were made out of fluorescent cloth, moving like blood cells through capillaries, weaving in and out of the white lines. I another two minutes, everything was pretty much gone."
(with 10 mg, intravenously, over a 50 second period) "My face was suddenly very hot. I could not breathe fast enough."
(with 10 mg, intravenously, over a 77 minute period) "There were no psychological changes."
(with 16 mg, intravenously, over a 3 minute period) "Almost immediately I felt a burning sensation in the roof of my mouth and I felt a tingling all over my body. My face turned purple, and my chest feels crushed. Everything has a yellow haze, and I was sweating heavily and I vomited. Words can't come. My mind feels crowded. When I start on a thought, another one comes along and clashes with it. I can't express myself clearly. I am here and not here. It has now been forty minutes and I feel better, but I still feel like I would like to walk it off, like a hang-over."
EXTENSIONS AND COMMENTARY : This is a presentation of the very earliest studies done with bufotenine with human subjects, studies with 14 schizophrenic patients at a state mental hospital and with two convicts in a state prison. Two convicts at a state prison were injected over the course of three minutes, with a solution of bufotenine as the salt. This single observation, a description of hyperserotoninemia (a release of serotonin in the blood, called a carcinoid flush) was all it took, at the right time and the right place, to put bufotenine on the books as a "dangerous drug" by FDA classification. And with the passage of the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, it was placed in Schedule I as a hallucinogen, with a high abuse potential and no accepted medical utility. Whatever the actual activity of bufotenine might be, and what role it could play in explaining the complex role of serotonin in the human animal, today it would be extremely difficult to study, because of the flushing of the face of an experimental subject in a prison in Maryland in study that occurred at just the wrong time.
-shulgin/TIHKAL