From Alexander Templeton
Your article on ayahuasca claims that dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the only hallucinogen produced naturally by the body (26 June, p 42). This is incorrect.
After the second world war, reports emerged of oxidised adrenalin causing hallucinations in users of outdated asthma inhalers. They also occurred in anaesthesia patients who were given “pink” adrenalin during the war.
In 1952, Abram Hoffer, Humphry Osmond and John Smythies, in conjunction with D. Hutcheon, D. MacArthur and V. Woodard of the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine in Saskatoon, Canada, developed and verified the hypothesis that adrenochrome, an oxidised derivative of adrenalin, is an endogenous hallucinogen structurally similar to mescaline. This hypothesis has been controversial for the past 50 years due to difficulty in assaying the unstable adrenochrome molecule.
Nevertheless, adrenochrome and its toxic breakdown product adrenolutin have been found in the urine and blood of people with schizophrenia. It was determined recently that adrenochrome is produced in substantial quantities in heart muscle, so the controversy over its endogenous synthesis has finally ended.
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Adrenochrome is not unknown to the recreational-drug crowd and readily produces the desired hallucinations and thought disturbances – and occasionally bad-trip symptoms similar to those of paranoid schizophrenia.
Seattle, US
