BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
VoL. 25, No. 10 
DE PLANTIS TOXICARIIS E MUNDO NOVO 
TROPICALE COMMENTATIONES XVIII 
Phytochemical examination of Spruce’s ethnobotanical 
collection of Anadenanthera peregrina. 
Richard Evans Schultes! Jan-Erik Lindgren? and 
Bo Holmstedt? Laurent Rivier? * 
One of the classical hallucinogens of the Americas is the 
snuff prepared from beans of the leguminous tree Anadenanth- 
era peregrina (L.)Speg., better known in the literature by its 
former name Piptadenia peregrina (L.)Benth. (1). 
Long known from the Orinoco River basin of Colombia and 
Venezuela, this psychoactive drug has been mentioned by 
virtually all of the early scientific explorers of the area. In 1916, 
it was identified by Safford as the source of the enigmatic 
cohoba, the narcotic snuff of the West Indies, the use and 
effects of which were seen among the Taino Indians of His- 
paniola by early Spanish explorers in 1496 (2). 
While the drug is no longer employed anywhere in the Carib- 
bean islands, the extent of the use of Anadenanthera peregrina 
has still not been clearly defined. It may be that, in isolated 
localities in the southern part of the Amazon Valley, the tree 
was until recently the source of a snuff. There is circumstantial 
evidence, too, that the very closely allied Anadenanthera co- 
‘Botanical Museum of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
2Karolinska Institutet, Department of Toxicology, Swedish Medical Research Coun- 
cil, Stockholm, Sweden. 
3Permanent address: Institute of Plant Biology and Physiology of the University, 
Lausanne, Switzerland. 
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