Local Indigenous Plants and Fungi by James Pate Williams Jr., BA, BA, MSwE, PhD

Back in the 1970s I attempted follow in intellectual footsteps of the now largely discredited sociological cultural anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda. I tested on myself several extracts from indigenous plants and mushrooms. These naturally occurring drugs discovered by shamans were as follows:

  1. Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) which I may remember contains the tropane alkaloid: atropine. Atropine has been used in medicine to dilate the pupils of human eyes for study by an ophthalmologist. It is also a hallucinogenic alkaloid. The antagonist of atropine is scopolamine.
  2. Amanita muscaria (the fly agaric also known as a mushroom) contains a few hallucinogenic alkaloids including an insecticide that kills flies that feed on the mushroom.
  3. Stropharia cubensis a mushroom that contains the hallucinogenic alkaloids psilocybin and psilocin.

In the halcyon days of my youth 17 – 21, I planned on becoming a pharmacognosist that is a scientist that hunts for useful alkaloids to be found in nature.  To follow in footsteps Castaneda and Manske (“The Alkaloids” an encyclopedia of useful drugs from the natural world in 70+ volumes), I would need to be well trained in botany, ecology, pharmacology, plant physiology, etc. Good thing I did not go down that path since I might have accidentally overdosed on a new alkaloid.

I have an anecdote I like to retell about obtaining samples of the mushrooms 3 above. There was a farmer on Whitesville Road next to the old Troup County High School who had cows in a large pasture. I knew that in August there would be psilocybin yielding mushrooms growing out of cow manure. A male partner in crime of mine and I just casually went up to farmhouse door and politely lied to the farmer about being students of mycology from Auburn University and we would like to gather some mushroom samples from his pasture. He said “Sure, just do not disturb my cows”.

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Author: jamespatewilliamsjr

My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.

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