The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 47 of 125
Schultes finds natural LSD in morning glories
The dispute was to be resolved from an entirely different quarter: from the fieldwork of the Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes. Richard Schultes was the last of the great explorer/botanists of an earlier age. As a graduate student he had researched the peyote cult in the American Southwest. Moving to Mexico, he collected the first specimens of teonanactl, the legendary Aztec psychoactive mushrooms (it was this research of Schultes that had first directed the Wassons to Huautla). Next he identified ololiuqui, another long-lost Aztec psychedelic, one said to have been used for divination, as the seeds of one of the morning glories. These, when he sent them to Albert Hofmann for analysis, turned out to contain lysergic acid, which was the first time LSD had been discovered in a natural form.