(Found) Mid 70's, man in jungle takes drug that slows him to tree "speed"

fabrice4

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Mid 70's, man in jungle takes drug that slows him to tree "speed", animals don't attack him because in other time speed or similar, maybe some meditation involved

thanks
 
It has been a long time since I have read the only match I can think of for part of that description: "Alien Earth" by Edmond Hamilton.

It was written in 1949, so the mid-seventies might be when you read it. If yours turns out to be a different story, I would love to find it and read it.

Teak-cutters somewhere around the Mekong River, somewhere around Laos, and natives take a drug (naturally-derived, as many drugs are: perhaps from mushrooms) that slows all of their metabolism, movements, thinking, perception to plant speeds.
I think they not only see the plants' movements, but have much more awareness of, and communication with, them.

I do not remember anything about animals' reactions in the story. It is not meditation, but the drug, that increases communication with plants in this story.

In my clouded memory, I had thought that a sympathetic biologist had taken the drug in an attempt to understand the plants, and was dragged back by other people living in so-called "normal time". (I daresay the plants would have a differing opinion on that.)

But teak-hunters are not going to be sympathetic to plants, and much of the forest gets killed when one of them accidentally releases a plant-disease mold.

I am looking for the story again after years. One teak-cutter may be sympathetic to the plants after experiencing them via the drug. He dies, I think attempting to save the tress from further cutting. Another teak-cutter, I think, becomes sympathetic after his experience.
 
I've read that story in the anthology of the same name. I see I made a note against the Hamilton story: "Could perhaps be called early shamanpunk."

I wonder what I meant....
 

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