The "just say no" campaign at this point is a lot like drawing sea-monsters over certain unexplored areas of the map and expecting people to stay away. It may work for some, but explorers live for this kind of thing.

We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.

Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.

Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.

And I want to thank all the women that support me. I have wonderful support systems from women of all types who seem dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna can always be improved. I'm extremely grateful for that. The frontiers are enormous in that dimension.

I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.

I'm proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.