Mushrooms' active ingredient expands the mind, study finds

[Guest guest]

Eric Brand asked.. Is anyone aware of any evidence that psychedelic drugs

were known in

Chinese medicine?

 

 

 

The taoists were said to drink ling zhi to make them psychic. Don't ask me

the source of the quote but it came up at The university of technology

Sydney during my studies there.

 

A few of us in the class started drinking ling zhi , prepared with the

double boil method, 1 cup each night with a few slices as the dosage. After

a couple weeks we noticed that we could get by with less sleep , and felt

like sleeping less, about 6 hours and not feel tired or get irritable during

the day. We did not get psychic though. Or no more psychic than what I

am/was already :-)

 

 

 

Heiko

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Behalf Of Eric Brand

Friday, July 14, 2006 6:13 AM

 

Re: Mushrooms' active ingredient expands the mind, study

finds

 

 

 

Is anyone aware of any evidence that psychedelic drugs were known in

Chinese medicine?

 

As far as I know, there is awareness of the solanaceous deliriant

drugs such as datura and henbane in Chinese medicine, as well as

awareness of the psychoactive effects of nutmeg. But I am not aware

of any evidence that Chinese medicine has encountered or dealt with

any psychedelic drugs that provided an adequate margin of safety to

allow for their use or popularity. Obviously, mushrooms would be a

likely candidate, but does anyone have any resources that document

their use?

 

As far as I know, psychedelic mushrooms were not known outside of

Mexico until the 1950s when Gordon Wasson wrote popular articles on

them in Life Magazine. While psychoactive mushrooms occur and are

used in Asian countries such as Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia, I'm

not sure if there is any evidence that they were used historically.

I'm not even sure if the mushrooms now in use have always existed in

the ecosystem there.

 

Eric

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Eric,

 

" It seems that psychoactive use of cannabis has generally occurred

around the periphery of Han Chinese culture, usually in conjunction

with foreign influence. I'm not sure if this has always been the

case, but I don't know any information to the contrary. The fact that

the cannabis in the major Han regions is non-psychoactive hemp is

certainly a factor, but active trade with areas like India would

presumably have introduced cannabis preparations. "

 

When I was poking around the Internet last week about all this, I came

across a site that said that, prior to the introduction of opium,

cannabis was widely used in Chinsa as an intoxicant. After the spread

of opium, cannabis use died out. Sorry, I didn't keep the site/cite.

 

Bob

[Guest guest]

On 7/17/06, Bob Flaws <pemachophel2001 wrote:

>

>

>

> When I was poking around the Internet last week about all this, I came

> across a site that said that, prior to the introduction of opium,

> cannabis was widely used in Chinsa as an intoxicant. After the spread

> of opium, cannabis use died out. Sorry, I didn't keep the site/cite.

>

 

 

 

There are quite a few:

*http://tinyurl.com/esb2e

 

*

 

 

--

 

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

I sometimes work with a Doctor of Medical Qi Gong and here's what he

wrote me about a certain reishi product (I've altered the text to

avoid promoting a specific product and have his permission to quote or

copy his statements)

 

" With ___ Reishi I have to say I had a great meditation. In reality

with ____ Reishi I saw colors which in Shen-Kung science means that

helps the Shen Body ... "

 

>

> The taoists were said to drink ling zhi to make them psychic ...

>

[Guest guest]

> The taoists were said to drink ling zhi to make them psychic ...

 

I believe that if one regularly practices qigong or meditation, ling zhi

or various herbal shen enhancements are more likely to produce these

miraculous effects and hallucinations. The occasional meditator will

not go there with the help of these substances.

 

Frances Gander

Athens, Ohio

[Guest guest]

, " Bob Flaws "

<pemachophel2001 wrote:

> When I was poking around the Internet last week about all this, I

came

> across a site that said that, prior to the introduction of opium,

> cannabis was widely used in Chinsa as an intoxicant. After the

spread

> of opium, cannabis use died out. Sorry, I didn't keep the

site/cite.

 

I'm a bit slow on my replies, I have too much work at the moment to

make any major investigations or replies, but I have a few random

replies to several comments that have been made in this thread...

 

While there are many references to cannabis use in China, it remains

difficult to find reliable primary sources that discuss it in

depth. Most of the links that the internet provides feature the

same basic quotes about the early knowledge of cannabis to the

Chinese, which of course is only natural since cannabis is believed

to have originated in Central Asia, China, or India. The Chinese

used hemp as a food crop and an industrial crop since ancient

times. Clearly they were aware of its psychoactive effect early on,

as evidenced by oft-repeated Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing comments (the

line that says something like ¡°duo chi kuang zou¡±- lit. ¡°eat lots,

walk/run manically¡± is particularly fun reading because ¡®kuang zou¡¯

sounds a bit like colloquial slang in modern Chinese, ¡®crazy¡¯ having

a similar pattern of wide slang use as in English).

 

But beyond these quotes from the authors of the Shen Nong text,

there is relatively little major evidence for a subject that should

otherwise be full of historical references if it enjoyed a time of

vogue. Instead, we see lots of repetitions of information like Hua

Tuo¡¯s famous anesthetic ma fei san, a formula that has been lost, no

one knows its actual ingredients and speculation that it contained

medicinals like aconite, cannabis, datura, and turmeric is simply

speculation; we don¡¯t even know who wrote some of the material

ascribed to Hua Tuo, but it is believed not to be Hua Tuo himself.

Or maybe everyone else is finding all kinds of references to a huge

Chinese cannabis culture and I keep seeing the same simple weblinks

with nebulous info.

 

If you look to the bottom of this message at the translated actions

listed in the zhong yao da ci dian for the various parts of the

cannabis plant, it is obvious from the indications that preparations

produced from psychoactive parts of the plant were recognized for

this effect, and the zhong yao da ci dian does reference some of the

cannabis medicinals as having a ¡®ma zui¡¯ action (in most contexts,

ma zui means anesthetic, but it seems to have a wider range of use

beyond this meaning). Nonetheless, there is little sophistication

in the extraction techniques, notably the absence of oil or alcohol-

based preparations, which would be far more efficient than decocting

the female flowers as the text suggests (unless a fatty ham hock is

also in the soup).

 

At any rate, there is evidence that the plant¡¯s effects were known

throughout history, but I¡¯m still not convinced that cannabis drugs

ever enjoyed major popularity in Chinese culture or medicine.

Today, most of the cannabis that grows in China is non-psychoactive

hemp. It was probably selected for its fiber long ago, and it

probably diluted any drug strains in the wild population to the

point that all that we see today in Eastern China is industrial hemp

that would not produce a high no matter what dose was used. The

only regions in China that are known for psychoactive cannabis are

Yunnan province in the Southwest, and Xinjiang province, bordering

Central Asia in the Northwest. In Yunnan province, most locals

don¡¯t even know that cannabis is a potentially psychoactive drug;

I¡¯ve seen enormous 8 foot female plants in full bloom right outside

public bathrooms in Kunming, a city of over 3 million people.

There¡¯s relatively little awareness of it even though it is a common

plant in the landscape.

 

In general, I think China historically had a paucity of drug

plants, at least in comparison with the New World or Africa. The

use of amanita mushrooms and datura is typically seen in cultures

that are otherwise lacking in drug plants that are safer and less

toxic choices (the exception of fearless Native American or East

Indian shamans who take on datura notwithstanding). The absence of

psychoactive cannabis relative to fiber hemp throughout much of

China suggests that psychoactive cannabis was either not widely used

or available, unless it was eliminated at some time in the distant

past. However, even in the absence of their own crops, I would have

expected for them to use imported drug cannabis preparations from

surrounding areas such as India or the Middle East, since they were

trading together (perhaps racial prejudices affected their

acceptance of the drugs of other cultures? Wouldn¡¯t be the first

time¡­).

 

Or maybe Chinese flora had a number of drug plants that simply

weren¡¯t discovered or popularized? For example, a variety of plants

available to the Chinese would presumably make active variations of

the South American drink ayahuasca, alluded to in passing by Kip

earlier in this thread. Ayahuasca, the combination of 2 Amazonian

plants that are not psychoactive unless combined together, relies on

a mechanism of enzyme inhibition wherein one plant inhibits an

enzyme, allowing alkaloids in the other plant to become available

instead of being metabolically broken down. Theoretically, the

Chinese should have been able to combine certain plants based on the

same principle, though of course that principle was not known or

described as such until modern times. At any rate, there has been a

lot of media coverage in the New York Times, etc about this drink

ayahuasca because it has been the subject of various legal battles,

since a Brazilian church uses it in rituals that have been granted

religious exceptions to drug laws in some countries (such as the US)

and have been denied in others (such as France). A quick search

shows that the Chinese had many plants that could theoretically make

combinations like ayahuasca based on their chemical profiles, but it

is not immediately obvious that they were ever discovered. My

internet surfing discovered that one of their candidates, wu zhu yu,

has even been extracted into a concentrate that produces a powerful

hallucinogenic effect (same active ingredient as the snuff ¡®yopo¡¯

that is used in the Amazon, you know the one where the anthropology

photos always show pictures of South American Indians twitching on

the ground from a blowgun shot up the nose of a dozen tablespoons of

tree resin, and the guys are lying on the ground in a trance with

green snot pouring down their face, that one). Fortunately, our

normal clinical use of wu zhu yu appears to be unaffected by any

major risk of drug interactions, since clinically effective doses in

TCM are nowhere near potent enough to pose problems.

 

Now, I don¡¯t really buy the notion that Chinese society and much

less the Taoists were teetotalers who were opposed to altered states

of mind, since all manners of things to alter the state of mind were

done, ranging from meditation to acupuncture to crazy sex stuff to

the ingestion of various mineral drugs containing cinnabar and other

stuff in the alchemical quest for immortality. Not to mention in

the mainstream, what with the wine-inspired poems of Li Bo and the

evidence of heavy consumption of distilled spirits that can be found

in CM writers like Li Dong-Yuan or Zhu Dan-Xi. And of course opium

and tobacco were big hits upon their arrival to the mainstream

society. Yet when it comes to the Taoists, for all their enthusiasm

for rudimentary chemistry and mushroom lore in general, there is not

exactly a huge amount of evidence that they had anything less subtle

than lingzhi and mercury to work with. (Big thanks to Gus for the

citations, maybe those Harvard papers have more clues!)

 

Below is a translation of the zhong yao da ci dian¡¯s main entries on

the parts of the cannabis plant:

 

 

Â黨 ma hua refers to the flower of male cannabis plants. Ma2 hua1

is bitter and acrid in flavor with a warm nature; some sources

indicate that it possesses toxicity. Its actions are to dispel wind

and quicken the blood. It is indicated for the treatment of wind

disease with numbness and tingling of the limbs, hemilateral

itching, and menstrual block. Ma2 hua1 may also be mixed with moxa

and burned in cones on the skin to treat scrofula.

 

Âé¸ù ma gen is the root of the cannabis plant. Ma2 gen1 dispels

stasis and stanches bleeding. It is used in the treatment of

strangury diseases, flooding and spotting, vaginal discharge,

difficult delivery, retention of the placenta, and knocks and

falls. It is taken orally, either as a decoction or crushed to

extract its juice (for the fresh form).

 

Âéʈ ma fen refers to the flower of female cannabis plants. It is

acrid, bitter, and balanced, and is traditionally considered to

possess toxicity. Its actions are to dispel wind, relieve pain, and

settle tetany. It is indicated for ¡°pain wind,¡± which is a type of

impediment disease that is characterized by acute pain of an unfixed

location. Ma2 fen2 is also indicated for other impediment patterns,

mania and withdrawal, insomnia, and cough and panting. The dose

used is 0.3¨C0.6 g when taken internally as a decoction, or it may be

crushed and applied to the affected area for external use. It is

contraindicated in weak health or in pregnancy.

 

ÂéÒ¶ ma ye refers to the leaves of the cannabis plant. The leaves

are acrid and are said to possess toxicity. Ma2 ye4 is used to

treat malaria, panting, and roundworms. The leaves are crushed to

extract their juice for use in making pills and powders.

 

ÂéƤ ma pi is the cortex of the cannabis stalk. It is said to enter

the large intestine and spleen channels, and it dispels stasis and

disinhibits water. Ma2 pi2 treats knocks and falls and hot

strangury with distention and pain

 

Eric