Influences
Schultes was initially influenced to study psychoactive drugs by Heinrich Kluver, a leading scholar of this subject (personal communication from Schultes). This interest evolved by way of Schultes' field observations on peyote, studying the peyote cult among the Plains Indians in his travels with Weston LaBarre in the early 1930s (in 1938, LaBarre based The Peyote Cult on these travels and observations).
Schultes' personal hero was Richard Spruce, a British naturalist who spent seventeen years exploring the Amazon rainforest.
Schultes, in both his life and his work, has directly influenced notable people as diverse as biologist E.O. Wilson, physician Andrew Weil, psychologist Daniel Goleman, poet Allen Ginsberg, ethnobotanist, conservationist and author Mark J. Plotkin, and authors Alejo Carpentier and William S. Burroughs. Timothy Plowman, authority on the genus Erythroxylum (coca) and ethnobotanist and Wade Davis were his students at Harvard.
Read more about this topic: Richard Evans Schultes
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