Project Nirvana: How the War on Drugs Was Won, Leaf Garden Press, 2014

Project Nirvana How the War on Drugs Was Won Pyotr Patrushev Copyright © 2012-14 by Pyotr Patrushev All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Second Edition ISBN: 978-0692247150 Published by Leaf Garden Press LeafGardenPress.com in association with Peganum Books www.pyotr-patrushev.com 2 Table of Contents Foreword ................................................................................. 4 Destination Unknown ........................................................... 10 Win Some, Lose Some .......................................................... 24 The Supersoma ..................................................................... 34 The Yogi And The Inquisitor ................................................ 48 Dr Larchuk’s Discovery ......................................................... 57 Richard Snowden’s Rebirth .................................................. 63 Meditation Practiced Twice a Day... ...................................... 71 Larchuk Defects .................................................................... 75 The Americans Get Worried ................................................. 79 Holiday on the Black Sea ...................................................... 81 The Conspirators ................................................................... 93 Democracy in Action ............................................................. 99 Bigger Than an H-Bomb ..................................................... 105 Glavny’s Dream .................................................................... 112 Double Blind ........................................................................ 116 The Unthinkable Happens .................................................. 120 Message to America ............................................................ 126 Homeward ........................................................................... 134 Appendix A. Scientists Win Nobel Prize for Medicine ....... 138 Appendix B. Are Drugs Experimenting with Humans? ..... 142 About the Author ................................................................ 147 Foreword I first thought about writing Project Nirvana in the sixties when I arrived in Australia as a refugee from Russia. There was a personal reason to my choice of drugs and alcohol as a theme for Project Nirvana. My father and my brother were both alcoholics. Many of my Russian friends drank excessively. Although in Russia I never smoked or drank alcohol at all, I began to drink and smoke while in solitary confinement in a Turkish jail, where I was detained and interrogated after my escape from Russia. I was aware of the tremendous influence that alcohol had exercised on the Russian mind, body and spirit. I broke my drinking habit by starting to meditate. I struggled with smoking for many years and finally gave up tobacco when it became clear that it would destroy my heart and kill me if I continued to smoke. All these strands of thought and experience came together when in the late eighties and early nineties I began working as an interpreter and consultant at the Esalen Institute, located on the West Coast of California. The Esalen Institute was and still is one of the leading institutions of psychological training and holistic medicine in the United States. Over the years, tens of thousands of people from all over the world attended Esalen seminars and went through long-term live-in volunteer programs. During the late eighties and early nineties, Esalen had a very active Soviet- American exchange program. Under its aegis well-known Soviet and American scientists and writers were allowed to interact in a free and uninhibited manner. These seminars were not only intellectual, but also experiential. The scientists took part in shamanistic and rebirthing sessions and indulged themselves in the world-famous Esalen massages and spas. One of the scientists whose work was important for Project Nirvana was Dr Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born psychiatrist who in the sixties conducted pioneering experiments with alcoholics using LSD-25. When 4 Foreword | 5 the use of LSD became restricted, Stan shifted his work to what he called "holonomic integration," which involved rapid breathing and evocative music to provoke LSD-like experiences in his subjects. Another participant in the seminars was Dr Andrew Weil who has now become probably the best-known longevity and holistic medicine practitioner in the United States. At the time he was involved in the exploration of psychedelic plants and their effects on human consciousness. A Harvard graduate, he taught medicine at the Arizona Medical School, and he even had a species of mushroom (Psilocybe weilii) named after him. In 1972 he travelled to a Mexican village where, under the guidance of a local curandera (a native Mexican woman-shaman), he participated in a healing ceremony. In this ceremony he consumed twenty-two specimens of Psilocybe cubensis ("magic mushrooms") and later reported that the curandera considered the mushrooms to be the gran remedio cure (the great healing substance). My discussions with Dr Weil and during a trip to an American-Indian sacred place in the Arizona desert (see photo on the back cover) had a profound influence on my thinking. I was an avid yoga and meditation practitioner in those years and was against the use of any drugs, plant or otherwise. However, as I lived and worked as a radio correspondent in California, drugs were all around me. Dr Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin was my neighbour in Berkeley. One day he dropped a vial of pills into our kitchen table, saying that this is something we might enjoy taking. Shulgin is now credited with popularising MDMA (street name "ecstasy"), especially for the treatment of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Sasha was a leading psychopharmacologist who worked both for the government and for large pharmaceutical companies. He told me that MDMA and similar drugs could open people's hearts, and may even bring “peace on Earth”. I took his claims with a grain of salt as I distrusted all chemicals and did not really believe that 6 | Project Nirvana anything at all could suddenly bring “peace on Earth” after thousands of years of violent human history. But the strongest influence that finally made me sit down and write Project Nirvana were my meetings and conversations with Dr Aron Belkin, director of the Moscow Center of Psychiatric Endocrinology who also conducted research into drug addictions. He told me about a project they had discussed at the Institute. The project was to rescue the native inhabitants of the Kamchatka peninsula, on the Far Eastern seaboard, from being wiped out by vodka. Kamchadals, as the natives of Kamchatka are known, were in the past avid consumers of the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria, also known as Fly agaric. R. Gordon Wasson described in great detail the effects of this mushroom on the natives of Siberia and Kamchatka in his book Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. The mushroom is intoxicating, and appeared to boost endurance of the natives, who would, for example, run faster and for longer distances after their sleds on snow. The shamans used mushrooms in order to experience visions that allowed them to see more deeply into the psyche of their patients and the spirit world. Such practices persisted since times immemorial among Siberian and Far Eastern natives. No harmful effects were observed or reported. Even deer were seen to be fond of the mushroom, which they were observed eagerly drinking the urine, containing a residue of the mushroom, whenever their riders would stop to relieve themselves. When vodka was introduced, the native tribes in Siberia and the Far East were devastated by it. Vodka had also caused such excessive mortality and disease among the general population of the Soviet Union that one of the first reforms that Mikhail Gorbachev introduced when he came to power was to restrict the sale and production of alcohol. However, the economic damage from this reform (sales of alcohol being traditionally an important element in the Russian Foreword | 7 economy) and the resistance of the population were such that the reform was hastily abandoned. Dr Belkin thought that it might be a good experiment to restrict supplies of vodka to an isolated population in one of the villages on Kamchatka and provide them instead with their trusty mushroom. When he mentioned this idea, half- seriously, half-jokingly, to his superiors at the Institute (many of whom were members of the Communist Party), he was told to forget all about it if he did not want himself and the rest of the Institute staff to be sent to a prison camp in Siberia. There was another personal connection to the Amanita mushroom for me. My maternal uncle, Mikhail Leshchin, who was an NKVD officer until his enforced retirement on the Kamchatka Peninsula, due to some incurable skin disease, healed himself with Amanita mushroom after spending some years with the natives. He has learned their lore and healing methods and became a prominent holistic health advocate who was lauded by the Pravda newspaper for his work. Unfortunately, towards the end of his life, he started mixing Amanita decoctions

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