PLEASANT DELUSIONS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 11382, 6 December 1930, Page 12

PLEASANT DELUSIONS

DOCTORS TEST MEXICAN DRUG ON THEMSELVES

VISION OF RAIN OF COINS ON

GOLDEN CARPET Experiments have been • made on themselves. by Two London doctors with, mescal—a potent drug . which until fairly recently was known only to doctors and certain tribes of Mexican Indians.

Now, however, it is becoming perilously popular among drug addicts. One .of the experimenters is Dr. Macdonald Critchley, junior neurologist at King’s' College' Hospital. His tests showed that mescal, which is derived from a. cactus native to the deserts of Central America and called by tho Indians “Devil’s Root,” or “'Sacred mushroom of the Aztecs,” evokes visual hallucinations of astonishing variety and vividness while the eyes are either closed or open.

VISIONS FOR 24 HOURS

The condition progressed for about an hour and .a half, when it reached its maximum. It then continued at, full power for many more hours. In fact 24 hours passed • before the visions entirely faded. While ho was under tho influence of (he drug Dr. Critchley was able to write down descriptions of what lie saw. He has told the Society for the Study of Inebriety and Drug Addiction that he saw:

“Yellow specks dotted on a black background.,. . .they are becoming larger and more numerous, and are forming a pattern. Red is now the most prominent colour; the arrangement is liko a carpet, consisting of concentric rectangles, dark-red. sal mon-pink, blue-golden, and so on. Large white specks dart rapidly in from tho periphery on to the carpet, like bright silver coins pouring into the centre—or else like white streaks of lightning. Everything is now moving; the carpet design is breaking up and gives place to a mas of bright spangles dancing rapidly all over the picture." As the potency of the drug makes itself folt more and more intensely he sees: • . “A meadow with . buttercups and daisies; now it is changing into a stereotyped park, with a bandstand and with chairs, each one of which is whizzing rapidly round on its own. axis. Butterflies are coming, in from all sides; the bandstand lias disappeared. . The butterflies all collect into the centre and arrange themselves into a circular, brightly, coloured flower-bed, rotating rapidly in a clockwise direction in a most wonderful manner. - Now a huge, field of primroses. . . a complicated pattern like HamptonCourt maze brightly coloured with objects quickly in a snake-like, , 'sinuous fashion along apparently endless pathways of, the, maze. Dr. Critchley Told, a “Daily Mail” reporter that his visions resembled a cinema-show. “They were always extremely pleasant,” he said. A Woman who has imforined the society that she ' had taken mescal in tho form of pills said: “Everything was so funny that I roared with laughter the whole dav long.” The drug is dangerous in the sense of being hadit-forming and harmful mentally and physically. 3 ,