Where adrenochrome comes from
Adrenochrome is an oxidation product of adrenaline, a rather unstable reddish compound formed when this hormone degrades. In the mid-20th century, during the height of psychedelic research, a handful of psychiatrists wondered if this substance, produced by the body itself, could be involved in severe mental disorders. The hypothesis was suggestive: if the body naturally generated a compound capable of altering perception, perhaps schizophrenia had a concrete biochemical basis.
The primary proponents of this line of inquiry were Humphry Osmond—the same man who would later coin the term “psychedelic”—and Abram Hoffer, working out of Canada. Their method was distinctive in that they did not limit themselves to observing patients: they became the test subjects themselves. The following texts are condensations of those self-reports, which are valuable as historical documents rather than clinical evidence.
Osmond’s first self-report (1952)
In September 1952, Osmond injected a small amount of the red-purple solution and recorded his impressions as they occurred over nearly an entire day. He did not expect much from what he considered a mere preliminary bioassay, and he noted that he was not particularly tense or suggestible.
Despite this, he described progressive perceptual changes: the room’s lighting seemed more intense, the environment changed “in a way that is difficult to define,” and, upon closing his eyes, patterns of colored dots appeared—less vivid than those of mescaline, he noted, but of the same type—which began to take the shape of fish. He even felt like an anemone at the bottom of an aquarium.
The most interesting aspect was not the visions, but the emotional component. A Van Gogh self-portrait appeared three-dimensional and alive to him; the Rorschach plates seemed extraordinary. But upon leaving the laboratory, the hospital corridors he knew well became hostile and alien, the cracks in the floor took on an unsettling meaning, and, once at Hoffer’s house, he felt disconnected from people without being sad: he was uninterested in the experiment or his own success. The next morning, however, everything seemed beautiful and the colors were charged with extra meaning.
The second session (1953): the “glass wall”
A year later, he repeated the experience with a larger amount, suspecting the material had deteriorated. This time there were hardly any visions, but the sense of estrangement intensified. The outside world felt even more hostile, and, above all, a profound emotional detachment set in: his sister’s voice on the phone did not produce any warmth, watching patients dance did not spark interest, and when he crossed paths with a pedestrian on the road, he looked at them “with curiosity and detachment,” without the slightest concern for what might happen to them.
He began to wonder if he was still a person or if he was perhaps a plant or a stone. His interest in inanimate objects grew as his interest in humans faded. In a note he wrote during a scientific meeting—addressed to Hoffer—he summarized it this way: he had the sensation of a “glass wall” between him and the world, fluctuating and almost intangible, revived by any small stress; slight “ideas of reference” appeared, and he even doubted that it was his own hands that were writing. He also lost the ability to calculate distances and time, to the point of not knowing if the car he was traveling in would collide with another. By the next day, as he noted, he was himself again.
What Hoffer observed from the outside
Hoffer, as an observer, described a striking contrast with Osmond’s usual social behavior: strong preoccupation with inanimate objects, refusal to communicate, and resistance to the team’s requests. In the second session, the most notable feature was the isolation: Osmond entered the house, sat down, and spent nearly an hour absorbed in examining the carpet, without greeting anyone. He summarized the changes in five traits: preoccupation with the inanimate, negativism, weakening of associative processes, anxiety, and distractibility. The next morning, it took him two hours to get dressed.
Other teams: Taubmann, Jantz, and Grof
The Canadians’ work was not the only one. Taubmann and Jantz explored the sublingual route with the idea that the compound would reach the brain less degraded than via intravenous injection, as happens with other substances absorbed through the oral mucosa. Their subjects reported a corrosive sensation, mild facial warmth, tingling in the fingers, and, frequently, moderate pain in the heart area; the physical symptoms subsided in about half an hour. On the psychic level, depression predominated over euphoria, along with marked visual alterations—strange colors, distant objects that seemed close, apparent movement in static things—but without clear thought disorders. A detail of no small importance: the activity of the material varied according to how it had been prepared, pointing to a problem of purity and stability that runs through all this literature.
The most careful studies in humans were signed by Stanislav Grof’s team in the early 1960s. Also working via the sublingual route, the authors concluded that the changes in thought induced by adrenochrome resembled those observed in schizophrenia. That conclusion is the heart of the so-called “adrenochrome hypothesis.”
Critical reading
It is advisable to read all of this with a cool head. First, because of the method: these accounts are self-reports, without a placebo control worthy of the name, with tiny samples, and, in large part, with experimenters who were both the subjects and the defenders of the hypothesis they wanted to confirm. The very instability of the compound and the differences in activity according to its preparation make it very difficult to know what was actually being administered in each case. It is no coincidence that subsequent research has not established adrenochrome as a potent psychedelic or as the biochemical cause of schizophrenia: the hypothesis remained, at best, a footnote in the history of biological psychiatry.
Second, because of the current context. In recent years, adrenochrome has jumped from the scientific archive into the conspiratorial imagination, becoming the center of delusional—and dangerous—hoaxes about alleged exploitation networks. None of that has anything to do with what Osmond, Hoffer, or Grof described. One thing is an adrenaline oxidation molecule studied marginally seventy years ago, and quite another is the fantasy circulating on social media today. Distinguishing between the two is exactly the kind of informational hygiene we value at Psiconáutica.
Finally, a note of caution that applies to this entire territory: historical accounts of self-experimentation are not a guide. They are cited here as a document of an era in which the boundary between researcher and guinea pig was blurred, not as an invitation to replicate anything. The quantities and routes that appear in the original sources are part of the historical record, not a recommendation.
Sources cited by the original authors: Hoffer and Osmond, “Adrenochrome and some of its derivatives,” in The Hallucinogens (Academic Press, 1967); and the works of the Grof team published in the early 1960s. We reproduce the references as they appeared, without independent verification of each citation.
