COURAGE DOPE THAT FAILED.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17573, 25 June 1925, Page 5

COURAGE DOPE THAT FAILED.

‘ I DRANK TWO QUARTS.” WHITE MAN’S TRIAL. LONDON, May e. A white man's experiment in drinking a decoction of caapi, the South American drug, which is claimed to give courage and fortitude and make a man willing to fight any number of enemies, is told by Mr Gordon MacCreagh in the American magazine “Adventu re." Mr MacCreagh, who drank the stuff while on an expedition in Amazonia, where the native devil men were holding a whipping ceremony, writes:--"The courage medicine didn’t work, I was careful to note my own reactions, and the most I can ascribe to the dope is a certain exhilaration, a sort of don’t-car-a-darn feeling. "This was sufficient to urge me to

don paint and feathers and hop right in with the gang of natives, but no more. "I drank gourd for gourd with the warriors, and must have drunk a good two quarts of the stuff, but at n</ time did I feel whooped up to the extent of rushing forth to face a sturdy savage with a long whip who thought he was the devil. INDIANS INSPIRED. “On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the Indians were inspired by the stuff beyond their normal pitch of courage. My conviction is that their reaction was fullv 75 per cent psvchological. “Twenty-five per cent perhaps was due to the exhilaration of the drug, and the rest to the attendant hereditary beliefs "There was a very definite and shameful limit to my courage. "When it came to the whipping ceremony and I saw those long curling whips with which the devil men lashed the naked bodies of the warriors, I hadn’t any illusions. I quit cold. "The Indians, however, went through as gory a beating as I ever care to see, and of eight warriors never a one winced.’’