by Richard Evans Schultes

THE PLANT KINGDOM has always been man's main source of the necessities and the amenities of life. Since the prime necessity is and always has been food, man must have eaten experimentally every conceivable kind of plant material in times of hunger. Some of the plants which he put into his stomach were outright poisons with which he was physically unable to experiment more than the first time. There were others, however, which, although they did act in some ways like poisons, induced physical and mental states not at all unpleasant and oftentimes of startling unreality. Man had then become familiar with narcotic plants.