Pharmacopoeia, according to Webster, is an authoritative book containing a list and description of drugs and medicinal products together with the standards established under law for their production, dispensation, and use. Pendell's two-part title,
Pharmako/Poeia, reflects what he calls the "twin poles" of his explorations in pharmacology and poetics. It's a book about the interplay of plants, insects, animals, and humans, and it suggests how toxins shaped ecological systems. It's also about the people who for thousands of years investigated the properties of plants and learned to use them for healing, for their effects on the mind, and for poisons. Pendell writes about such topics as tobacco, opium, beer, wine, alcohol, and kava, exploring their history, taxonomy, pharmacology, and effects. The book contains a prodigious amount of scholarly and technical detail, yet Pendell writes with wit and inventiveness. Engaging black-and-white illustrations and provocative quotes complement the text.
George Cohen
Review
“Dale Pendell reactivates the ancient connection between the bardic poet and the shaman. His
Pharmako/Poeia is a litany to the secret plant allies that have always accompanied us along the alchemical trajectory that leads to a new and yet authentically archaic future.”
—Terence McKenna, author of
True Hallucinations “Much of our life-force calls upon the plant world for support, in medicines and in foods, as both allies and teachers. Pendell provides a beautifully crafted bridge between these two worlds. The magic he shares is that the voices are spoken and heard both ways; we communicate with plants and they with us. This book is a moving and poetic presentation of this dialogue.”
—Dr.Alexander T. Shulgin, University of California at Berkeley, Department of Public Health
“
Pharmako/Poeia is an epic poem on plant humours, an abstruse alchemic treatise, an experiential narrative jigsaw puzzle, a hip and learned wild-nature reference text, a comic paean to cosmic consciousness, an ecological handbook, a dried-herb pastiche, a counterculture encyclopedia of ancient fact and lore that cuts through the present ‘conservative’ war-on-drugs psychobabble.”
—Allen Ginsberg, poet
“The great joy of
Pharmako/Poeia lies in the simultaneous drawing out of simplicity and complexity. Simple, so far as it draws together the vast territory of the human-poison relationship into a single, poetic alchemy; yet complex, in that it blows apart the narrow simplistic understandings that stratify each bubble of understanding. This is a truly excellent book and should be on the shelves and minds of all poisoners, all students of life, literature and ethnobotany. Whether your poison is Salvia divinorum, tobacco, alcohol, Nitrous oxide, or bitter berry, or even just the unquenchable thirst of a psychoactive knowledge, this text should be a given.”
—Psychedelic Press UK
“Pendell demonstrates that the art of a cross-disciplined approach is not only still alive, but has the power to augment understandings above and beyond its parts. He reveals the depth to which scientific/poetic dichotomies are often no more than categorical fallacies.”
—Dose Nation
“Dale Pendell’s remarkable book will make it impossible to ever again underestimate the most unprepossessing plant. This compendium of how-to-get-high-by-eating-your-lawn ethnological data is mind-boggling, useful, and serves as a fine end run around the guardians of ‘official’ consciousness.”
—Peter Coyote, actor
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
