So I'd love to hear how you first got into it.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I started off as an anthropologist, you know, in a very serendipitous way.

I was always enchanted with people.

And, you know, I was lucky enough to study anthropology.

Anthropology today kind of studies itself, you know.

But I was at the tail end of the classic kind of ethnographic Boasian dream, if you will.

The idea that the role of the anthropologist as an interlooker was really to almost in a... evangelical ways share the fundamental revelation of anthropology, the idea that the world in which we live doesn't exist in some absolute sense, but it's just one model of reality.

How do we get a bit of that respect back in a wider way? And what can the herbal community do?

Um, i- is that what you mean by raw and authentic experiences?

Oh, I think it goes even deeper than that.

Remember too, I certainly was a complete product of the 1960s, and the 1960s really went from the breaking of The Beatles and the death of Kennedy through the resignation of Nixon.

So if you were born in '53 as I was, you really were a child of that era, and it was an era of alienation.

It was an era when we were coming to terms with, um, injustice, racial injustice, the war in Vietnam, um, the hideous way that women were treated, the violation of gay people.

All this stuff came together in a kind of whirlwind, and I think a lot of us were drawn outside of that world that we saw to be somewhat ... uh, confining, banal, whatever the word is, and we were looking for something raw, something new, something fresh, something exciting.

Uh, I think that's sort of the pilgrim's quest.

Some people said, "Oh, travel's dead."

[laughs]

And you know, I know, I'll, I'll say something very personal.

I mean, I have two daughters, and they've, both of them, for different reasons, have been on some of these serotonin uptake inhibitors, you know, Prozac and, uh, never Ritalin.

But, you know, I've watched that, and what I experience in my life, which is a very productive life, is that I function perfectly well without coca.

Just like old Schulte used to say, he'd chew coca every day in the Amazon.

He didn't chew it in Boston.

I find that if I run out of coca, my life goes on.

I'm sure there's nice, good publishing of valuable content coming out there, so people can check that out, and then Wade?

[chuckles]

... at laboratory experiment.

And when it came time to these plants called the fantastica, which, uh, we now know as the entheogens or the hallucinogens, even the old professor had his limits, so they had to do a book report.

And Schultes raced to the back of the room to get the thinnest possible book to read, put it in his satchel, went home to his yellow tenement in East Boston, and that night, uh, botanical history was made because the book that he had selected by chance was Henrik Kluver's, um, monograph on peyote and mescaline, the only book available in the English language on that subject.

And throughout the night, he read of these visions of orb-like brilliance, and he became enchanted.

And he went back to Ames and said, "I have to know this plant." And so Ames pointed him to the literature and the Tarahumara and the Huichol.

And then the summer of, I guess it was 1936, yeah, I think '36, he and Weston La Barre, an anthropology student from Yale, headed out to Oklahoma Territory to study the Native American Church and the use of the peyote cult.

Right.

So, as somebody who loves mambé as much as I do, could you talk a bit about it and its effect versus the leaf?

Well, I mean, one of the most extraordinary things about cocoa, when we first did our research in the 1970s, you know, botanists distinguished species based on gross morphology.

And based on that...

Tim Plowman concluded that the domesticated coca of Peru was a progenitor of the domesticated coca of Colombia.

And I did mention that there are two recognized cultivated domestic species of coca, coca erythroxyl and coca.

in southern Peru and Erythroxon nova granitensi in Colombia.

Each of those had two different varieties.

Are there positive and negative lessons here?

In fact, it's the night before you have to declare, and you still don't know.

came around time to define your major.

And I hadn't given it a thought, Tommy.

I ran into a friend in the street and I said, well, Stuart, what are you going to major in? And he said, anthropology.

And I said, what's that? And he said, well, you read about Indians.

I said, well, that'll do.

And so I signed on as a student of anthropology.

What's your response to that?