Oh my god, this is one of the worst psychoactive-related books that I’ve ever seen. If it weren’t sitting here in my hands in hardcover print, I’d assume it was a bad usenet post. The entire book is preachy, uninformed, and filled with errors. It weaves a strange description of peyote, psilocybe mushrooms, and Amanita muscaria mushrooms where the boundaries between these three very different plants are blurred and their effects are described as nearly identical.
The book repeatedly warns that many people have died from the effects of peyote and psilocybe mushrooms. It also attempts to explain that many people choose to use these plants in a search for the divine, but the reader is cautioned that “it is best to stay within the framework of your own culture and seek God in the time-established ways.” As though perhaps these people have a clue about either spirituality or psychoactive plants. They clearly don’t.
Unfortunately this appears to be one in a series of books … I shudder to think what the others contain.
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I remember seeing this book in my high school library a few years back. While I didn’t expect much from its appearence (sometimes you SHOULD judge a book by its cover), it blew away my already low, low expectations. For one thing, it’s barely even legible. The writing flows about as well as cold molasses-jumping from one seemingly unrelated topic to another. The author also mashes several psychoactive plants (mescaline cacti, psilocybin mushrooms, and amanita mushrooms) into basically one substance, describing nearly identical effects for this freakish creation of this author’s mind (perhaps one day we will discover this elusive “psilonita cactus” :) .
1/5 stars
Comment by monoamine — 5/6/2005 @ 12:32 am