GRGR(12): plastics questions

[Jeremy Osner]

"J. Herzog" wrote:

> LSD was first discovered by Hofmann in 1938, but it's properties were not
> fully realized until 1943, when the doctor took his famous bike ride on
> acid. So I guess the hipsters of the Zone could have been aware of it two
> years later. Hofmann later synthesized psilocybin in 1958.
>

Oh, oops, too long since I read *Acid Dreams*... Something intriguing is, I
was just looking in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica trying to make sense of
Mario Schweitar's dig on p. 261 at "indole people"; I'm sure this is old news
to many people on the list but it was new to me: indole is the active
ingredient in indigo; it is found in coal tar and shit; and psilocybin has
got the same molecular structure as. (Psilocin too.) Plus, not sure exactly
what this means but, the first heading under the Indole Pigments section of
the Nitrogenous Pigments article is, what else but *Melanins*. (The other
heading is "Indigoids".) I see a theme here...

--
We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed.
The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever,
moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves.

V. S. Naipaul
_The Mimic Men_