effects of harmine on thirty-two schizophrenic subjects. 
They wrote, ‘‘ Diffuse alterations usually occurred in 
many realms—autonomic, motor, perceptual, emotional, 
intellectual, and behavioral.” Some of the effects of 
harmine were: 
nausea and vomiting; slow, coarse, spontaneous tremor of the 
extremities of an ‘extrapyramidal’ appearance; humming and 
buzzing noises (no voices); ‘waviness’ of the environment; 
‘sinking’ sensations of the body ; subjective sense of body vibra- 
tion; and subject numbness, accompanied by objective evidence 
of reduced sensitivity to light touch and pinprick. 
Bradycardia and hypotension were very marked. They 
observed a ‘‘semidelirioid or confusional state’’, with 
drowsiness and some amnesia, accompanied by a shallow 
euphoria and visual hallucinations. 
Gershon and Lang (/4) suggest that ‘‘The chief cen- 
tral effects of [harmine] are an anxiety type response in 
normal man and an activation of psychotic processes in 
schizophrenic subjects. This distinction is of the utmost 
theoretical importance in that [harmine] may fall into a 
very special group of psychotomimetic agents. ”” 
Naranjo (25) experimented with harmaline on thirty- 
two Chilean subjects, nearly all of whom found it hallu- 
cinogenic. Visions of serpents, tigers and birds, and of 
negroes, and experiences of flying, of death, and espe- 
cially an acute awareness of a human soul separated from 
its body, were common themes. 
Experiments with rats have shown harmaline to nulli- 
fy aconditioned avoidance-escape behavioral reflex (27). 
VI 
The following account presents some of the details 
concerning the preparation and use of Banisteriopsis by 
Sibundoy medicine-men in diagnosing and treating so- 
matic disease and in discovering therapeutic agents. The 
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