About the Author

Plant student Dale Pendell established himself as one of the foremost popular exponents of shamanic ethnobotany with his unprecedented Pharmako trilogy. A noted poet, he was the founding editor of the avant-garde magazine Kuksu and a cofounder of the Primitive Arts Institute and has led workshops on ethnobotany and ethnopoetics for the Naropa Institute and the Omega Institute. Pendell was part of the Oracular Madness theme camp at Burning Man for a number of years (his book Inspired Madness- The Gifts of Burning Man was published by Frog Books in 2006). Also an experienced computer scientist, he lives with his wife Laura in California's Sierra foothills.

Reviews

“A poet, ethnobotanist, and amateur chemist, he’s the best writer on drugs to come along since the late Terence McKenna.”
—The Village Voice
 
“Dale Pendell, most elegant eloquent writer on drugs because both scientist and poet, has exuded a book as charming as The Compleat Angler or Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. It will be preserved amongst the scriptures of an entheogenic revival that will recognize the scribe Pendell as an inspired prophet and forerunner.”
—Hakim Bey
 
“Dale Pendell’s books are elegant tapestries of accurate chemistry, pharmacology, and botany, interwoven with rich poetical imagery. I use them as textbooks in a large annual undergraduate class which I teach at the University of California in Berkeley. The students love them.”
—David E. Presti, PhD, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley