Inevitably, there is a proliferation of available substances, legal and illegal, of all sorts from solvents to exotic herbs, and rapidly-changing fashions bring one or other to prominence in ever quickening cycles: ecstacy & other phenthylamines; MMDA, 2CB, 2CT2, etc.; DMT & other tryptamines; enhanced cannabis; Ketamine; Salvia Divinorum; Amyl Nitrite, Prozac; Viagra; and others are coming into popular use.

Only the electronic media can compete for attention with the drug culture, and the claim of the electronic media on the human nervous system is limited by the 'real-time problem' which stems from the fact that whatever appears on-screen only makes sense in relation to the viewers' experience of life, just as text only makes sense to someone who knows the language and how to read. But while the viewer is watching the screen, he/she is getting no real-time experience, and so what appears on the screen becomes increasingly meaningless and must become ever more shocking, violent and vulgar to make any impact. Furthermore, in a homogeneous world and mechanised culture where children are robbed even of the modest adventure of walking to school and gazing in at shop windows, there is less interaction with the environment and thus less no first-hand personal experience to which to relate literature, art, theatre, film, even music or conversation.

By extension, the potential benefits or harm of various drugs, indeed their very effects as experienced, depend on culture and context: something which is entertaining in secure and plentiful circumstances can be devastatingly inappropriate at work or in a situation where an impoverished environment requires full-time effort barely to maintain life ... substances as beneficial in surgery as local or total anaesthetics, are dangerously deleterious as habitual entertainment.

For example the effects of cannabis on the few westerners privileged to have access to it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Baudelaire, Lewis Carrol, etc) were, from various published accounts, much akin to the profound effects of LSD in the nineteen-sixties, effects which in these millenial days can seldom be achieved by anything less potent than DMT...

How can one distinguish between being high and being so confused that one can't tell up from down?

Zeitgeist notwithstanding, narcotics remain narcotics and psychedelics still exert the same chemical effects on the synapse as ever ... unfortunately, neither subjective experience nor chemical structure is a reliable guide to which substance does what: the effect of narcotics is to numb and in that numb state, subjective judgement is unreliable. Similarly misleading are efforts to predict the effects of a substance from its chemical structure: similar substances can have radically different effects.

But often clues can be found by considering the effects of a very large dose, and what the history of long-term human use might reveal. Any substance which has been in use for thousands of years is probably of known toxicity, and any psycho-active drug which is fatally toxic in large quantities is almost certainly narcotic in sub-lethal doses.

As chemical prowess develops, inevitably increasing numbers of psycho-active compounds are synthesised, discovered, or re-discovered among the dwindling remainder of plants not yet extinguished in the shrinking forests and wild places of the earth.

Because a lock can be opened by only one shape of key, but blocked by numerous shapes, it is far more likely that novel psycho-active compounds will turn out to be narcotic and to block the flow of signals for various periods with various intensities, rather than psychedelic and facilitators of the flow.

There are three main families of psychedelics: Cannabis, Phenethylamines, and Tryptamines. Cannabis has been used for so long by so many that it is known to be entirely harmless, other than the irritation caused by hot smoke in the lungs. This makes cannabis deadly when combined with its psychic opposite tobacco, which uses the irritation of the lungs induced by the cannabis smoke to insinuate itself into the circulatory system, where it subverts cellular process to cause fatal diseases eg arterial sclerosis, cancer, heart disease, etc

Smoked pure, cannabis induces coughing which removes tars etc from the lungs (in contrast to tobacco which numbs the respiratory tract in addition to the digestive tract, allowing its deady tars to accumulate). Certain simple chemical processes (isomerisation, acetylation and others) can be applied to cannabinoids to increase their potency and duration. Neither cannabis nor of its salts or derivative are known to be toxic even in very large quantities.

Phenethylamines, of which there are hundreds of compounds, are related to amphetamine, which is not psychedelic at all, but the very contrary. However this group of compounds includes among others mescalin, which is purely and entirely psychedelic... in this group of compounds, the structure/activity relationship is particularly unpredictable and the metabolic pathways as yet are largely unknown. It is entirely possible that some of these compounds' metabolites (breakdown products) are themselves psycho-active, and that a psycho-active phenethylamine can be metabolised to an amphetamine before being finally eliminated, and there is some reason to suspect that this might be the case with ecstacy (MMDA) . However it is also entirely possible that the 'speedy' effect of E is due to the tendency of the unprepared nervous system to respond to a sudden rise in input by seeking out environments which minimise the effect: crowds, loud noises, flashing lights etc. and the parallel efforts of the organism to dissipate the rise in input by raising output (muscular activity, eg frenetic dancing) .

Grandfather compound of the hallucinogenic amphetamines is MDA, legendary hippy love-drug of the 1960s. Although not widely available, this is perhaps the most beautiful of the phenethylamines: furthermore this drug has been known for almost a century and is harmless. Also available is 2-CB, which, unusually for a psychedelic is very dose-dependent: much less than the full dose (about 25 mgs, often five x 5-mg tablets) has little effect, while small increments above this amount augment the intensity disproportionately.

Other phenethylamines of varying duration and intensity are occasionally available, (eg 2 - CT - 2,). They are probably harmless and while experimentation is natural, there is small benefit to using these expensive and relatively new compounds in preference to LSD and the other psychedelics of long-proven efficacy and benignity such as magic mushrooms, currently available in Britain and Europe, and the newly-popular DMT, all of which have been used widely for half a century and are known to be harmless, especially in a supportive and tranquil (low back-ground noise) setting.

Among Tryptamines commonly available are the series DMT, DET, DPT, as well as Psyloscin (in the form of magic mushrooms) and various homologues and derivatives. DMT is very rapid in onset, short-acting and so easily digested that it must be smoked and is not active orally. It must be smoked with attention, for less than the full dose (30 mg) gives very little effect.

Ketamine, for example is a parenteral (injectable) anaesthetic, and is a perfect example of a narcotic which can easily be taken for a psychedelic by the uninformed or unwary.

Salvia Divinorum, on the other hand has the extraordinary effect of interrupting access to the perceptual referents, eg up/down, left/right ... it has some of the characteristics of a short-acting psychedelic, slightly reminiscent of, but quite distinct from DMT . Although not straight-forwardly psychedelic in the way that LSD or magic mushrooms are, it is not speedy or narcotic in any way, and the experience is remarkable, leaving one feeling cleansed and inspired. It has been used for millennia in south america and is harmless.

Ibogaine has been used for millennia as (in Africa) and by all accounts appears to be powerfully psychedelic, with the good omen that it is recommended as a cure for addiction, that is, as a habit breaker, unlike Khat, another widely-used african drug which like tobacco is narcotic and numbs the digestive tract.

Amyl Nitrite (poppers) briefly blocks the nerve which carries the signal regulating the heart ... the heart races out of control and over-oxygenates the brain, which responds with inane laughter as though reacting to sensory overload. (Laughter is a hard-wired program involving baring the teeth with the function of smoothing out spikes in sensory input.) In a sexual context, over-oxygenation of the brain precipitates orgasm.

As their appalling effects and addictive characteristics become apparent, so the various semi-legal narcotics pushed in vast quantities upon an unsuspecting public, eg vallium, librium, mandrax, etc are replaced by a new generation of wonder-narcotics: prozac, viagra, etc etc. which will in time become apparent as slow-onset, long-duration numbing agents, to be replaced by yet other etc etc etc

A certain fad has developed for so-called smartness drugs. Since the metabolism draws whatever it needs from an ordinary diet, rejecting and ejecting the rest, the only real smartness drugs are psychedelics which, by blocking open the gates of perception and allowing more signals to flood the nervous system, evoke the response whereby more nerve fibres are grown and more connections made to cope with the extra traffic, in a way analogous to a muscle enlarging in response to heavy use. Thus the three-dimensional information-processing net which is the nervous system becomes enriched, more associative, and more powerfully predictive, ie imaginative. Smarter, indeed.