Stuff You Should Know - How Peyote Works

Episode Date: August 15, 2019

Josh and Chuck have tackled a lot of drugs on the show, but peyote has loomed like a bad Jim Morrison poem. Learn all about this plant today.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, Maine and Greater New England. Hello. We're coming to see you guys in Portland, and we can't wait, we would love to see you there. Yep, we'll be at the state theater on August 30th,

and if you're interested, you can get tickets and information at sysklive.com. There's some lobster at us. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there, and Wowie's Owie. Pavement's best record? I think, no, no, hold on, no. It's not Wowie's Owie. It's not Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. It's the one between them with Summer Babe. Oh, no, that was the first one.

That's Slanted and Enchanted. Okay, that was their first album? God, what a classic, man. I think that's their best one, is it not? Well, Crooked Rain gets cited a lot of times as sort of the peak pavement. Slanted is for fans of like the early sloppy days, lo-fi, which we both love.

Sure. I like Wowie's Owie because it was so strange and weird. I haven't heard that one very much. It's great. Okay. They're all great. I like them even right down to the last one. That's good.

The weird polka experimental album that they came out with? They announced they're playing another couple of reunion shows at a festival in Portugal. Wow. And we're in touch with Mr. Bob Nistanovich, and I texted him, and it's like, do I have to go to Portugal? Is there anything brewing here in the States?

It's like, because I'll go. What did he say? He said, nothing as of yet. He's like, so go with God. Are you going to go to Portugal? Maybe. If that's the only chance to see pavement again, I might. Yeah, sure.

Because I want to go to Portugal anyway. You have frequent fire miles to use. A ton. Do it. You totally should. And drink some port while you're there too. Yeah. You know, my friend's opening up a wine shop in Kirkwood

that is very, not exclusively Portuguese, but that's where she's from. Oh, cool. It's going to be featuring a lot of Portuguese wines. That works really well with this episode, Chuck. Great. As we'll see later on, but just put a pin in Portuguese wine for later.

All right, so you started off by saying the words, wowie, zowie. Because we're talking about peyote, which is an hallucinogen. That's right. But from what I've seen, one of the oldest hallucinogens, people were eating mushrooms all over Europe,

north, central, western Europe for a very long time. Sometimes accidentally, which is hysterical. But people have been eating peyote for a really, really long time too, as we'll see. Thousands and thousands of years. And as a result, it's got a pretty interesting little history to it, both ancient and modern.

Yeah. And really, all it comes down to is it's a spineless cactus that has a very bitter taste. Hey, that's not nice. That never stands up for itself. But it is a spineless cactus, which means, well, if it's a spineless cactus, that means that desert animals probably love to eat it.

They don't, because it has a really bitter taste. And that bitter taste is an alkaloid called mescaline. Right, and that, it's a sign. It's a nature sign saying, don't eat me. Right. But just so happens that if we humans eat that particular alkaloid, we say things like wowie, zowie.

That's right, right. So, yeah, let's go. It is native to Mexico, in the southern U.S. It is, technically, the scientific name is Lofofora. Nice. William C.E. Now we decided that two I's means you pronounce both, right? You have to go yee.

Yee. And it grows in northern Mexico and south Texas, right along the border there. Sure. Pay-O-D knows no borders. That's true. And it loves the rocky limestone. And in historical documents,

it's had a range all the way up to New Mexico, perhaps. Yeah. We've either changed that with human interaction or that was just wrong. Right. But it definitely grows along the border. Yeah, and it looks like a little, growing up, did you ever see those little tomato pin cushions?

Yeah, oh yeah. Looks sort of like that, but it's not red. Yeah, I guess. And it doesn't have a pin sticking out of it. No. Although you could stick a pin in it. Sure you could. Put a bird on it.

It'd be very disrespectful to the spirit within the Pay-O-D, though. That's right. I probably wouldn't like that very much. That's true, like a little Pay-O-D voodoo doll. Sure. So like we said, the mescaline is to tell animals, stay away, don't eat me.

They also think it's possible that it has something to do with communications between plants. It may do a number of different things, actually. But one of the things about Pay-O-D is it has this reputation, a very mystical reputation, not just because it's a psychedelic and a hallucinogen, but because it is really, really hard to find

until it's not. It's got this reputation where you'll be looking all over for Pay-O-D. It grows in the rocky soil and typically it'll grow under like a creosote bush or a mesquite tree or something like that. Yeah, a nurse plant. Right.

But you can have looked all over underneath the creosote tree or whatever and you walk away and then you're like, I'll just go back and look again. And there it is, just staring you right in the face. You trip over a rock and you land on it. Right, there's the Pay-O-D. So it's got this kind of neat little reputation

for hiding, playing hide-and-go-seek with you. And then it's like, okay, all right, go ahead and eat me in trip, in trip. I was going to say something else. Like I said, it's not red. They can be brighter green, but they can also look sort of bluish, which is interesting.

That nice like steel blue-green, it's a pretty color. It is. And they grow and usually in clusters with multiple plants, but sometimes you can find them individually. And they, I think they're very pretty. They have little pink, white, and yellow flowers. They grow very low to the ground.

And they're just, it looks like, you know. Stubby. Yeah, a little stubby Tomatillo with. Pink cushion. Yeah, but it's not completely round. It has like sections. It's almost cylindrical a little bit too. So, yeah, I see what you mean.

You know what I mean? We're on peyote right now, everyone. Sorry. That's not true. So this plant in particular has a weird history of getting confused with other plants because some of the other plants that go around it are also consumed by some of the indigenous tribes

in the area and have been. But there's like a type of peyote plant that it's not psychedelic. It just makes you kind of sleepy. There's something called a plant that has mescalbenes that are intoxicants of their own type, but they can also kind of kill you. There was a while there where a peyote

was called both Laphephora Williamsii and Anhalonium Lewinii, right? Both have two eyes on the end. And then somebody's like, no, it's the same plant. So there's a lot of confusing horticultural history associated with. I wonder why. It's a peyote.

Am I right? It was playing tricks is what it was. So there is a, you know, people have used it not only for religious purposes, although that's a large part of it, which we'll get to in depth. But it does have some antimicrobial properties. I've seen that in really low doses

that certain tribes have used it for indigestion, to treat wounds, to give them energy. To work on a computer for days on end. Take your hangovers and like anything psychedelic, you could, technically you can use it to help treat mental illness, but they don't study that stuff in the United States. So again, it's always very hard to think about

any sort of ecstasy or magic mushrooms or anything without studying like clinical studies. Well, they did study for a while. Mescaline, once they isolated it from peyote was used like LSD was in the 50s until LSD came along. And they used it because they thought that maybe you could glean information about the root cause of schizophrenia

by giving mescaline to people with schizophrenia. But they found out it was too unreliable. People's experiences were too different. And there was no kind of structure that the individual followed. And plus they found out people with schizophrenia could tell the difference between their delusions and delusions brought on by mescaline,

which is pretty interesting. Oh, wow. Yeah. And when was that in the 50s, I guess? Pre 50s cause LSD came along in the 50s, so 30s, 40s, yeah. So when you harvest peyote, you cut off that stem really close to the ground

and they're known as buttons. They look like, I guess I'm describing as pincushions, but they look like little buttons. It makes sense to call them buttons. Yeah, and Ed here, Ed wrote this article, The Grabster, he said a typical trip is four to six buttons. And I thought that seemed like a lot of peyote because I'd seen photos of some buttons

that were like as large as the palm of your hand. And I'm trying to imagine eating eight things that big, pure eight tomatoes that large, that's a lot of tomatoes. But then I looked at other pictures and I guess those were like just super big peyote buttons. And most of them were a couple of inches in circumference. Were they that big? I guess they were more like the size of a quarter

or something like that. I think between a quarter and like a silver dollar maybe. Or a shilling for our friends in the UK. Is that a pence? Is that a quid? How does that all work? I don't know. A shilling, oh man, we're gonna get emails about this.

Oh, that's okay. A shilling is like 20 pence, I think. Are you going on record? Yes. Okay. But four to six buttons, like you said, it's really bitter. So a lot of times people won't want to eat it. There are all different kinds of ways you can make the tea with it.

And we're not giving you a how to. Right. But it's as simple as that. This is how people take peyote. Sometimes they'll grind into a powder and snort it or put it into a pill. I saw that you can smoke it too when it's dried and powdered. I've never heard of that before, but I ran across it.

But here's the thing, if you're down south of the border and you're out hunting for peyote, and if this is something you want to do, there's more power to you, but be respectful of the plant. Don't go digging it out with a shovel by the roots because you're going to kill the plant. Yeah, that's extremely disrespectful to a peyote plant, especially in the tradition of groups, indigenous tribes

that take peyote for ritual purposes. You do not kill the plant. You don't cut off the peyote button so low that the roots can't regenerate and you don't dig the plant out. Yet despite that, people do it all the time. And then that combined with feral pigs who like to eat it and trip.

Do they really trip? I don't know. They definitely like to eat peyote, so probably. Those two combined have really kind of put a hurtin' on peyote and its range. So people who are like conscious of this stuff say, well, you can also get mescaline out of what's called the San Pedro cactus,

which grows up in the Andes, and that's not threatened or vulnerable in any way. Go get it there. Yeah, just go to Peru. Don't stop in Mexico, keep going south. Should we take a break? Let's take a break, Charles. All right, let's take a break

and we're gonna talk a little bit about that mescaline right after this. ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know. Wash and show. Woo! ["Stuff You Should Know"] Stuff you should know.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That is the primary psychedelic chemical, and that was synthesized, what did you say, 1918 or 1919?

1919 by Ernest Spoth. Ernst? Ernst. Speth. That's how you'd say it, the A with an umlaut? Yeah. So you'd go, pfft. Ernst Speth.

Ernst. Pfft. An Austrian chemist. Sorry, Ernst, I do like your name. I did a little research. This is kind of the thing he did. That's big enough, don't you think? Sure.

The guy isolated mescaline for Pete's sake. Oh, no, no, no, I'm not knocking it. I was just, I thought it was going to be like, and you know what else he did? Right. And this is kind of what he did. He's known for that. Right.

And he was like, Joseph Priestley, who was like, I discovered nitrous oxide. And I also discovered 10 other things. And starred on Beverly Hills 902 on L. Yeah. Have you ever seen my shirt? It's the Judas Priest logo, but it says Jason Priestley. It's pretty great.

Is his face anywhere in it? Or is it just a? It just looks like the Judas Priest logo, but it says Jason Priestley. Nice. I got to see that. I like some of those shirts. It's one of the good ones.

The one I used to hate was the, when Farfag knew again, was the big thing. And the hippies would wear the F and Groovin. Yeah. I hated those. Me too. All right. So, Speth.

Speth. Isolated mescaline in 1919. The following year, the pharmaceutical company, Merck, is like, oh, we'll just turn this into a pharmaceutical. Of course they did. Started to get studied and released. And things were going along fairly swimmingly for it. It's a phenylethylamine, which makes it different actually

from LSD and psilocybin, which are tryptophanes. They're in the Indole family. Phenylethylamine is the family that mescaline is in and MDMA is in. And it's no coincidence that MDMA and mescaline are in the same family because the chemists who created MDMA, Alexander Shulgin, he was inspired to create something like mescaline from a mescaline trip

he went on. Imagine being like, oh, I really like that psychedelic I just took. Let me tinker around and make my own version of it. And he created MDMA as a result. It's kind of an homage to mescaline. He created MDMA and 2CB. Yeah.

Well, what mescaline does, it binds to the serotonin receptors in your brain and just like LSD or magic mushrooms and stuff, it's going to cause a sense of loss of the cell for ego and ayahuasca. We did one on that too, right? Yeah. And the interesting thing is Ed describes a cross-tolerance with other psychedelics.

So in other words, if you take a bunch of mescaline, it will build up a tolerance for LSD, let's say. Right, which is... Yeah, I guess it hits those same receptors. Yeah, I guess so, which is I guess a problem if you take a ton of LSD. But... I have a friend from college.

I won't name him, but one of the funniest quotes he has about the old days is, I've definitely forgotten I've taken acid and taken more acid. That's a t-shirt right there too. Yeah, that's deep. That's an 80s dead t-shirt. It is. F and grooving.

Remember that? Yeah, I remember. Yeah. Did you have one? No. Okay. No, no. No, mine said funk and grooving.

So when peyote binds to those serotonin receptors, some of the cells that it binds to are responsible for something called nausea. Oh, sure. And one of the hallmarks of a peyote trip is you very typically feel nauseous and vomit for a couple of hours sometimes leading up to the trip. And it's really slow to cross the blood brain barrier.

So it takes hours to come on. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. But it also has a real slow burn, a long burn to it. Right. So compared to other trips, it's actually a very long lasting trip, sometimes 12 hours as opposed to say

six, eight hours for LSD or mushrooms or something. Right. 12 hours is the trip you're going to be on on peyote. It's also like really well known for being extremely visual and having some interesting like body feelings to it too. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Like you can feel nauseous.

You can feel euphoric. You can feel euphoric and nauseous. But you're going to feel it in your body as well as have a lot of like really trippy visuals. I think didn't they take peyote in the Doors movie? Yeah. And that's a really good... And he vomited, I think, right?

Yeah. And that's where the whole lizard king thing came from because I think they took peyote in the desert. But it's also related to peyote in a different way too, isn't it, the Doors? Right. Because Aldous Huxley wrote Doors of Perception. He was a big mescaline guy, wasn't he?

That book was about his first mescaline trip. Right. And that's where the Doors got their name. Yeah. And then Jim Morrison went on to write a bunch of bad poetry. Oh man, I thought American Prayer was one of the coolest albums of all time. I bought his poetry book.

I was way into the Doors for like everyone, for a brief time in college. Sure. And I bought the book and I read the poetry books and everything. Did you ever listen to the album, American Prayer? Yeah, I thought it was all great. Now, though, in my 40s...

Yeah, I haven't listened to it in a while. I'm kind of like, yeah, it's not a great poetry. Yeah. Although maybe it is. What do I know? I'm no poet. You didn't even know it. So there's one other thing about Aldous Huxley too.

He coined the term psychedelic. Oh, really? And he coined it after his first Mescaline trip. Interesting. So Mescaline, not even just peyote, Mescaline has given the world MDMA, the Doors, and the word psychedelic. I'm going to have to tell Noel that because

movie crush listeners will laugh at this. Noel describes about 40% of movies as psychedelic. Oh yeah. I'll bet he described Mandy as psychedelic, didn't he? Oh, totally. I mean, you could not describe it as psychedelic. Yeah, absolutely. All right.

So let's talk about the history a bit. They've done some carbon dating. I read this one study of these peyote buttons at an archeological dig site that suggested that use went as far back as 5,700 BCE. And that those buttons still had mescaline in them that would work. Can you imagine tripping on 7,700 year old peyote buttons?

I mean, wouldn't that be something that you shouldn't do? Well, I wonder if that makes it weaker or if it's like a fine wine, if it's like strap in. This is 7,000 year old mescaline. Can you imagine? Like a bottle of wine from Thomas Jefferson cellar. Which apparently that stuff's not very good to drink.

It's just like a flashy thing that super rich people want on their shelf. So the name though they think is derived from, can you pronounce that? The Nahuatl. It's the southern most group of the Aztecs. Okay, but the word they use was peyotl. P-E-Y-O-T-L, peyotl.

Yeah. Peyotl. Peyotl. Peyotl. I think we got there. And they don't know what it means, but some people think it might mean the word glistening, but not everyone is on that train.

You could easily lose the meaning of a word for glistening. Sure. You know, that's a. Not a high priority word. No. But it's a beautiful word. But the first mention of Westerners encountering peyote is in this 16th century study called the Florentine Codex.

And there was a Franciscan missionary who wrote it named Bernardino de Sahagon. And he wrote, and this is in the late 1500s, on him who eats it or drinks it, it takes effect like mushrooms. Know what I mean? Also, he sees many things which frighten one or make one laugh. There you have it. Pretty straightforward stuff.

Yeah, for sure. But it definitely goes to show like, yeah, people have been eating mushrooms in Europe for a very long time. Yeah. So over time from like the 16th century onward in North America, people would come in contact with tribes that had like peyote rituals and they would try peyote themselves and they'd be like, this is crazy, but this is great.

Or I puked my brains out. This is awful. And so all these stories kind of started to come out. And then over time, peyote use really diminished. It used to be very widespread, not just where it grew, but even beyond its range. Like indigenous tribes in the area used to trade. So people who took peyote ritually, even after Colombian contact,

was pretty extensive. But then once like the missionaries took hold and European governments took hold, that really got outlawed to where it was basically boiled down to one tribe called the huichol. I actually looked that one up. Is it we or hui? It's hui, but the CHOL is the one you emphasize. It's huichol.

Beautiful, Charles. That's even better than peyote. At least that's what the YouTube told me. The YouTube. Am I saying the one with the spiral? Yeah. Is that one accurate? I'm pretty sure they're mostly accurate.

Okay, huichol. Huichol. Yeah. Okay. So the huichol are very well known for being the tribe most associated with peyote ritual use these days. But they're also very much opposed to western encroachment. Yeah.

And sometimes violently so. But I think those two are very much interconnected. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I didn't know that. I mean, instead of getting rid of all the things that we did and just swapping it out for Christianity like they were being told to do, they would just say, hey man, I'll incorporate some of your Christian ideas into our peyote ceremonies.

Yeah. And not just them, but the Native American church, which we'll talk about later, they did basically the same thing. That's right. So you've got a lot of peyote use that kind of went down to one tribe. And in a weird way, it rebounded. No, it shrank. Okay.

And then it contracted eventually even larger than before to where it is today. Yeah, peyote use today is far more widespread than it was a thousand years ago. Wow. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. That's definitely part of it because of American tourists. That's definitely part of it. And American tourists were turned on to peyote by a guy who was a UCLA anthropology student

back in the 60s named Carlos Castaneda. That guy. Did you ever read any of Castaneda's books? No, but he has been sort of exposed as a fraud and a con man in most academic circles. They will call him that. Right. In academic circles. Right.

He will step over a few rings to the new age circle. Right. The guy is a legend. Sure. And he wrote these books that were supposedly ethnographic studies about Don Juan Matis. And this is where Portuguese wine comes in, Chuck. Yeah, did you read this? Any Carlos Castaneda?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, back in the day. Good stuff? Yeah, it was very interesting. I only remember it. I mean, I'd heard of them, but from the Bongwanaer song. What is that?

They had a song called Folk Song where she talks about, you know, went somewhere looking for that Carlos Castaneda experience. Oh, Bongwanaer's name of band. Yeah, yeah. I got you. Yeah. That's a great name for a band. They were great. So Carlos Castaneda, he created these ethnographic studies that he turned into books that sold

like 10 million copies. And it was him being indoctrinated into the peyote way of life by a peyote magician, a Yaqui Indian named Don Juan Mattis. Right. And the Portuguese wine comes in because his longtime companion is convinced that Don Juan didn't exist and that Carlos Castaneda made him up and actually named him after Mateus, the Portuguese wine that she and he used to drink together all the time. Wow.

But she's saying like, that doesn't mean he's a fraud that he, you know, combined all these lessons and everything that he learned from his own peyote trips to kind of create this character that was like almost a spirit character and everybody said, no, he's a fraud. Like this was put out there as actual anthropological field work. And he basically lied and made all this stuff up and was exposed later on by some colleagues who really went to great trouble to expose him and undermine him. Because he sold 10 million books. 10 million books.

Still selling them too. It's like that guy. He said a big controversy like, she's one of those that probably 20 years ago or maybe not that long when Oprah exposed or she exposed him. Oh, James Fry. Yeah. She had him on the show. A million little pieces.

Is that it? Something like that. I read that book. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. And then found out afterward about the fact that a lot of it was made up and I didn't care. I was like, well, fine.

Call it a novel then. Right. I enjoyed it. Yeah. But Oprah really did not let that one go. Well. Remember she brought him back on. Yeah.

She was like, vouching for the guy or not vouching, but essentially you're sort of vouching if you recommend his book. I guess. But really, I don't know. I think the follow-up episode was unnecessary and really put the guy in the stocks basically. Yeah. I just remember thinking at the time, he just should not have called it a memoir or just call it a novel.

Right. And not to diminish anyone's experience and rehab, which I think was the problem. Is that what offended people? I think so. I mean, he basically made up some stuff about a real life tragedy that people go through. Was that 20 years ago? I don't think it was. 15 maybe?

15 maybe? I think I was. 10? I think it was like 15 because it was right before I worked here is when I worked with the chicken killers. We'll settle. We'll settle on 15 then. So Peiode, as far as Westerners go, it was really the 1800s.

Its effects were first discussed by a doctor in Texas named J.R. Briggs, who apparently just kind of stumbled upon it when he met someone from the Kiowa tribe who sold him some buttons, tried it out, wrote about it in 1887. And get this, he wrote that it was a respiratory stimulant and his heart started racing. And within a year, the company, Park Davis from Detroit, had a Peiode tincture out that they said will replace the addicting cocaine for a respiratory stimulant. And it was mescaline? Yeah, mescaline tincture, you just dropped some mescaline.

It used to be the Wild West, didn't it? Yeah, but this was Detroit. Well, the Wild Midwest. I've got one more story about this too. All right. Park Davis out of Detroit, Alistair Crowley, I don't know how he found out that they had this mescaline tincture, but he shows up at their door in Detroit, you know, Alistair Crowley the occultist.

Sure, he shows up and knocks on the door with his scepter. And he goes, I hear that you have some peyote tincture. Do you mind whipping me up a special batch? And they did. And he said it was like the best peyote tincture he's ever had. Really? Yeah. Out of all the peyote tinctures.

I guess he'd had a lot of them. I believe it. He wrote a book called like The Diary of a Mad Drug Fiend or something like that. So I mean, he knew what he was talking about. Yeah, I bet that's a good read. But the chemist at a pharmaceutical company whipped up a special batch of peyote tincture for him because he showed up on the doorstep. I wonder if he goes by the lab and he's like, guys, this is for Alistair Crowley.

Just put a little... Don't make eye contact? Just put a little extra mustard in this one. So there was a pharmacologist named Louis Lewin and he was the first to publish an analysis of these alkaloids that we were talking about. And this was in 1894. So stuff was going on back then in the late 1800s that they didn't quite understand, but they were writing about it.

Sure. There's also an article from the Aspen Times and I think 1896, it's just a newspaper article about some white pioneer types who found some peyote buttons from running into an indigenous tribe and took them and... In Aspen, Colorado? Yeah. Where Hunter S. Thompson eventually would settle. That's pretty funny.

It's pressing it. All right. Let's take another break here and we'll talk about the Native American church right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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you listen to podcasts. So check. There's something really weird about peyote in modern times and that is that the native American church, um, takes peyote, but the native American church is made up of plenty of tribes that never were exposed to peyote traditionally. That was all a byproduct of the forced relocation and reservation settlements that the, um, American government forced upon them. Right.

So there'll be like a native American tribe in Canada that can take this. Canada's nowhere near the natural range of peyote. Right. And it's not like it was traded all the way up into Canada back in the day. Right. And it's out of this intermingling in the Oklahoma territory. And what makes it even more interesting to me is that you can trace it back to basically one man named Kwana Parker, who was a Comanche chief, who was a bad a dude.

He was like one of the last holdouts and then managed to go from like, um, like basically at war with white settlers in the American government to one of the leading politicians of the Oklahoma territory, um, who actually bridged the gap between, um, the white government and the Indians who'd been relocated, um, he somehow, rather than just being, he went from bitter enemies to okay, let's figure out how to do this the right way. But he was the one who introduced peyote to the Oklahoma territory. Yeah. He went to Mexico in the 1880s and, uh, I guess brought a bunch back with him said this

stuff's great. And he said, let me just put a little bit of this in my hat and I'm going to ride back with it. Uh, but the Native American church, uh, became official in 1918, which I thought was interesting, like right around the same time that mescaline was synthesized and no one really knows how many people they have because it's not like, um, ed ed says it's like not a tightly knit organization is more like a set of principles. And my, the first thing that came to my head is like, it's probably because they're not,

they're not after anything. Sure. And it's like the Southern Baptist convention is very, uh, everyone knows exactly how many members there are there because it's very strict and formal and codified because there's, uh, I imagine they have an agenda of some sort. Sure. I don't think there's anywhere near the same agenda as among the Native American church, but they do share the fact that they are a Christian organization.

Oh yeah. That's as far as I know, they are Christian based peyote church. Interesting. Yeah. The second thing is you said, because it's sort of a, um, a mix of all different kinds of tribes and peoples that they have just sort of settled on, um, like it's, it's not like if they use like drums in a ceremony or, uh, a rattle in a ceremony, it's for that specific tribe.

They're more like, uh, generic, uh, Native American items. Right. Is that about right? Yeah. It's almost like, um, this is, yeah, there's no better way to put it really. Or they'll have, you know, even if they didn't use teepees in their tribe, they will have the peyote, uh, ritual ceremony in a teepee. Right.

No matter what. Because of its representation. Part of its representation, but also it was just a practical measure too, because on the reservation under the very watchful eye of like the white army officers who were in charge of ridding Native Americans of their customs and ceremonies, they couldn't do these peyote rituals out in the open any longer. So they actually took them inside in secret into teepees, which is why they're conducted in teepees still today.

Gotcha. Originally it was just to keep, uh, from under the eyes of the, the people who are charged with overseeing them and eradicating their culture. Interesting. Yeah. So they were like, let's just keep it in the teepee. Right. What happens in the teepee stays in the teepee.

You got it? So, uh, a modern ceremony, uh, in the Native American church with peyote is usually specific and it's focused on like healing, uh, most likely, and it's led by something called a road man. You sit around that fire, you take your peyote and you strap in for an all night experience where you're supposed to like really be into it. You're not supposed to lay back and look at the stars or take a nap or anything. You're supposed to really focus on, uh, I guess what you're trying to accomplish.

Right. Or what the peyote is telling you to pay attention to. Sure. I mean, it's not like, like checking on my hand and waving it in front of my face. Everybody see that? Funk and grooving man. How long has this been happening? It's like two hours.

No man. Right. And there's a science, uh, scientific American writer named John Horgan who wrote about being in a, um, Native American church peyote ritual and he said like, man, people were sobbing. People were throwing up. Like there was, it was very solemn. He said, and they were just being taught a lot of stuff by the peyote. Very interesting.

And the Native American church is in the United States, the only group that is allowed to, um, trade, sell, possess, grow, ingest peyote. And actually I don't think all of them can grow. I think you have to be a licensed peyotero. You do. To, to grow or harvest peyote. Yeah. Um, but you can be like, I'm a member of the Native American church and I can take this.

And for a while, um, from I think 1978 till the nineties, you had to be a Native American to be considered a member of the Native American church by the U S government and be, um, subject to be allowed to eat peyote, but that's not the case anymore. No. There was a Supreme court trial, I think. That's right. The, uh, American Indian religious freedom acts in 78 and 94 basically said it can't be race specific, so it's unconstitutional.

So you could technically join the Native American church. You could technically submit, um, and petition the government and register with the government and be a peyotero and grow peyote and take it and eat it. Yes. You, Chris Ball. That's who Chuck's speaking to right now. Who's Chris Ball? The guy who's listening.

Okay. Gotcha. I hope there is one Chris Ball. I kind of hope there's not now for legal reasons. But this was all necessary because, uh, here in the United States, of course, um, it was classified as a habit forming drug in 1929, which it's not, which it's not. And, uh, let me see in 1970, uh, the U S passed the comprehensive drug abuse prevention and control act where they had to put everything in categories, scheduled it as a late, uh,

schedule one labeled it as a schedule one, uh, substance, which is of course the worst of the worst they say. Which it's not, uh, and that's kind of it. You got anything else? Yeah. One thing I forgot to say is, um, even though it's not related to LSD or mushrooms, it's frequently compared to it in potency. And I saw that it's 30 times less potent than, than psilocybin.

The peyote is? Yeah. 30 times less potent. This just seemed really weird to me, but I saw it in like an actual study from San Diego state and Tijuana tech party school, um, and it's like 1,000 to 3,000 times less potent than LSD. Interesting. Yeah.

Well, then what is this 12 hour like, well, that doesn't mean that it's not going to like get on top of you and you can have a really bad trip and it's going to like, you're going to trip for 12 hours, but supposedly dose specific, like a gram of, Gotcha. Gotcha. Like a gram of LSD is just completely bonkers, the difference between the two. Well, because LSD, they've synthesized down to, you know, it's a little tiny piece of paper.

Sure. It's not eight buttons. That's right. Uh, I think that's it then. That's peyote. Yeah. Um, okay. Well, if you want to know more about peyote, go read some Carlos Castaneda books.

And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Uh, this is on eyewitness testimony. Hi guys. Uh, I thought I'd chip in a little bit about my own personal experience. So I've been living and working in Japan for the last 15 years. I've noticed I'm perfectly capable of identifying Japanese. As a matter of fact, I can sometimes recognize and pick out students that I taught many years ago on the train or the mall with relative ease.

I live and work in the, uh, Kansai area, which is a little smaller than New York city in terms of population. So I see a lot of people. Uh, meanwhile, back in the States during the holidays one time, I was shopping with my family, spotted my mom from across the store and, uh, walked over to her when I got closer. It wasn't my mom. What?

It was another woman that looked about the same age and height. And he wrote back after I told him I was going to read it and said, you know, just want to point out I'm just a white dude. Just a white dude. Right. Uh, and he said, so I think it's not that we are somehow magically better at identifying our own race, but are just better at identifying the kind of people that we are usually surrounded by, which is usually our own race.

Good point. That very good point. What's this guy's name? Chris Ball? No. He said, I thought you might find that interesting. Anyway, if you're ever in Japan again, Josh, let me know. Sure.

And, uh, just one small question for you. Did you ever take the jangwit, uh, the jangwit, the Japanese language proficiency test, which I think they call the jangwit test for short. Did I ever take it? No. Had I, I would have failed spectacularly. It's one of the great shames of my life that after all these years and being married to a woman of Japanese ancestry, I speak very little Japanese.

All right. Well, he says, I've just gotten done writing a book for the first level. I'd love to send it to you. Oh yeah, please. Chris. And that is, uh, from Clayton McKnight. Clayton. And he said, P.S., one of the textbooks I use in class as a hippie character in it named

Rob. No. That's what he said. Wow. That's what he said. Because I would like to learn Japanese. Yeah. Clayton.

Thanks, Clayton. I've been to Kanzai too before. They have a beautiful airport there that was designed by Renzo Piano. Nice. It's worth even just looking up pictures of it. It's that nice. Did you ever stay in that TWA hotel in New York? No.

No. Have you? No, but I saw it in a magazine article and I thought it looked pretty cool. Yeah, it does look cool. I haven't been to New York for a while. Yeah. The problem is staying out of the airport. Yeah.

JFK. Yeah, staying there overnight for a connecting flight that work. Yeah, why not? Let's do it. All right. If you want to get in touch with us like Clayton did and offer us a language book or anything, or just to say hi, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links there. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever

have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.