Medical Marijuana: The Upgrade

I live in a state where medical marijuana is legal for people with Parkinson’s disease, yet I don’t qualify because you have to exhibit specific PD symptoms which I don’t have (extreme malnutrition, severe or chronic pain, severe nausea, seizures, or severe or persistent muscle spasms – much obliged, Fox Foundation!).  And as I understand it, the research on the medical marijuana’s benefits, at least for Parkies, is scanty and inconclusive, thanks to federal government restrictions that classify pot in the same dangerous category as heroin.  The Obama administration recently relaxed the rules regarding medical marijuana research, so maybe we’ll have good, verifiable news in the years ahead.

But now a new psychoactive party drug has come along that at least one researcher believes holds hope for the treatment of Parkinson’s.  The “new” drug is ayahuasca, an ancient South American potion which you make by brewing together Banisteriopsis caapi vines with the leaves of the chacruna bush.

According to an article in this week’s New Yorker (click!), ayahuasca is the latest “it” drug for party people in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and other hedonist hot spots.  (Full disclosure:  I live in New York, but New York State, not New York City!)  It doesn’t sound like a party drug to me, because you sit for hours in an enclosed room where almost everyone vomits a lot.  However, users claim it helps them understand their place in the universe, makes them feel intense serenity, and allows them to throw up, I mean throw off, psychological blockages that have held them back their entire life.

You can read the article (click!) and decide for yourself whether this sounds tempting.  Remember:  there’s lots of vomit.  However, one passage stands out as approaching sanity:

Leanna Standish, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine, estimated that “on any given night in Manhattan, there are a hundred ayahuasca ‘circles’ going on.” The main psychoactive substance in ayahuasca has been illegal since it was listed in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, but Standish, who is the medical director of the Bastyr Integrative Oncology Research Center, recently applied for permission from the F.D.A. to do a Phase I clinical trial of the drug—which she believes could be used in treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s disease. “I am very interested in bringing this ancient medicine from the Amazon Basin into the light of science,” Standish said. She is convinced that “it’s going to change the face of Western medicine.” For now, though, she describes ayahuasca use as a “vast, unregulated global experiment.”

Well, at least the first half of the paragraph sounds sane.

To get a better idea of what the rest of the article is like, let’s jump to the final paragraphs, in which the author takes part in an ayahuasca party/ceremony in an enclosed room in a hipster section of Brooklyn:

“Help,” I heard Molly, the young woman to my right, squeak.

“You need help getting to the bathroom?” I whispered. Some people had been stumbling when they tried to get up and walk.

“No, I just need . . . some assistance,” she said, her voice shaking with barely contained desperation. Helper Angel was still busy with Pants [another woman] on the other side of the room. So I held Molly’s hand. I told her that she wasn’t going crazy, that we were just on drugs, and that everything was going to be fine. “Please don’t leave me,” she said, and started to sob. I told her to sit up and focus on her breath. Little Owl was drumming now, and chanting, “You are the shaman in your life,” in a vaguely Native American way.

“Please say more words,” Molly whispered.

I did, and Molly seemed to calm down, and pretty soon I was thinking that I was indeed the shaman in my life, and a downright decent one at that. It was at that moment that Molly leaned forward and let loose the Victoria Falls of vomit. She missed her jack-o’-lantern [a plastic vomit bucket] entirely and made our little corner of the room into a puke lagoon.

Just as when you stub your toe and there is an anticipatory moment before you actually feel the pain, I waited to feel the rage and disgust that experience told me would be my natural response to another person barfing all over me. But it never came…I sat there in Molly’s upchuck, listening to Little Owl’s singing, punctuated by the occasional shriek of “No more animals!” And I felt content and vaguely delighted and temporarily free.

Phew!  Thanks for sharing!

BTW, this issue of the New Yorker melds together with many interconnections, much like the disparate stuff in your stomach does just before you hurl.  For example, in a short Talk of the Town piece at the beginning of the issue (“A Guide to Womanhood“), two YouTube comedians (Jo Firestone and Aparna Nancherla) talk about what various alcoholic cocktails taste like when you’re plastered and throwing up:

In the “Womanhood” episode “Ruining Your Body at a Young Age,” Firestone analyzes what different drinks taste like coming back up—e.g., a mimosa becomes “a lemon poppy-seed vinaigrette, but gone bad.”

Another article in the same issue (“Where Germans Make Peace with Their Dead“) describes hours-long group therapy sessions in an enclosed room, where Germans communicate with the spirits of dead ancestors who were alive during the Nazi period.

There’s also a hallucinogenic short story (“Invasion of the Martians“) where a horn-dog senator from Texas has his penis shot off by invading Martians.

It’s enough to make my PD-addled head spin.