Now, my interest in hallucinogens is purely medicinal. I have never been able to understand the use of hallucinogens to get the religious experience. I don’t believe we can get religion through chemical means. In that way we are different from the Indians who have thousands of years of background using these in so-called “magical” religious rites. They have no concept, as I said, of organically caused sickness or death. The Indian has to explain everything to himself. Why, thinking as an Indian, why do these few plants, out of a half a million in the world, have these unearthly effects on the mind, and sometimes on the body, that they think and transport into outer realms of space? They have to explain this, and they believe that in these plants there is a resident spirit. We know that this resident spirit is a chemical substance. I have often told my students that I have never been invited at the theological school at Harvard to lecture. I’m a scientist. If I am, I can go and draw the formula of these spirits, and that is more than any theologian can do with his gods. That’s the reason these plants are separated from the ordinary plants that have dyes or are foods, or rubbers, or have other uses, or no uses. These are set on a pinnacle, and they are not abused as they are by many people in our own country and in Europe, civilized people, because these plants are sacred to them.