In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dennis McKenna, PhD—renowned ethnopharmacologist, author, co-founder of the McKenna Academy, and pioneer in psychedelic research for over 40 years. A central figure in the psychedelic renaissance, Dennis has explored the intersection of plant medicine, indigenous wisdom, and science since the 1970s.
We touch upon topics of:
- Dennis’ early trips to Colombia and the origins of the “La Chorrera” experiment (05:10)
- The unexpected role of mushrooms in his spiritual awakening (11:50)
- DMT and the search for orally active psychedelics (15:30)
- Shifts in his scientific path after the La Chorrera experience (22:20)
- Conducting biomedical studies with the UDV in Brazil (31:45)
- Differences between psilocybin and ayahuasca (45:15)
- The ethics and cultural impact of ayahuasca tourism (49:00)
- Sustainable ayahuasca cultivation and community economics (53:30)
- The myth of how indigenous people discovered ayahuasca (59:10)
- The importance of preserving tradition in modern psychedelic use (1:06:40)
- The vision for global symbiosis between North and South through plant medicine (1:13:20)
- Climate change and the message of Gaia through psychedelics (1:17:55)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com
Find more about Dennis McKenna at https://mckenna.academy or on Instagram @dennismckenna_
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Dennis McKenna: Humans have always carried plants wherever they go. People talk about bio piracy and all that, but in a way that’s an exaggerate. That’s tricky thing because that presumes in some ways that indigenous people assert an ownership of the plants and the knowledge.
But my limited experience, the people I’ve talked to, they weren’t all indigenous, but they were traditional healers. They love to share what they know. They’re impressed that you’ve come all this way to learn what they know about plants. They do not see that you’re there to steal their knowledge.
Sam Believ: Amazing. Thank you for doing it because maybe if you didn’t do those studies, it would not popularize. Maybe I would never even learn about ayahuasca and never started my retreat and never started this podcast. So it’s it’s really important. The work that you did earlier.
Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we, the whole assembly. Today I have a, an extremely special guest As you can see, Dennis McKenna, we’re coming to you from MAPS conference. Dennis is a PhD and esteemed ethno pharmacologist research scientist and author with over four decades of experience studying plant medicine, psychedelics, and indigenous healing traditions.
He’s a founder of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, where he continues to explore the frontiers of consciousness, science and ecology. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Ra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Dennis.
Welcome to the show. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. First of all, I just was at your presentation. It was amazing. I really love the message you’re putting out there and you’re, the things that you’ve done when you were younger that impacted the world of psychedelics and now, like you see this space with thousands of people coming through, none of that would be possible if you didn’t write those books.
So that’s
Dennis McKenna: You to say. I don’t think that’s really true. I can’t take, I can’t take either credit for blame or blame for all of that. I know that Terrence and I were influential, and that’s great. I think we were influential, but, I think. In some ways, this is an expression of this co-evolution I was talking about in the talk.
I really do believe the plants are running things in a certain sense, and we are at a critical juncture in the life of this planet. And I think that if anything, the sentient community of species is trying to send us a message to wake up to what we are doing to the planet before it’s too late.
It’s almost too late. We’re a very fractious species. We don’t listen very much, very well, and we’re in great danger. And so I think the earth even recognizes this, I think they’re influential people like my brother, myself, and many people here, we can’t take much of the blame, much of the credit or blame.
For example, Paul Stats, if you saw his talk, he is the now and very influential, and the movement, or the psychedelic community needs such people. But really this is another man manifestation of the co-evolution with these substances. And we, because we’re at a critical juncture, they’re becoming more visible, they’re becoming more loud, they’re becoming more, their message is becoming more strident, you could say.
It’s like they’re trying to send a message, which is wake up.
And understand what is happening and try to respond appropriately.
Sam Believ: We have many people that come to drink ayahuasca with us in Columbia, and they, some of them receive that message like, oh, the earth is struggling.
And they share it, share button. It’s a very common message because I believe what you’re saying with the plants being able to talk to us and giving a message and with the plants like ayahuasca and fungi like mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms being, being the messengers for Gaia, as you said in your presentation.
I wanted to talk to you about Columbia because you’re one of the very few people that mentioned Ayahuasca in Columbia, Jacque I’ve heard you talk about in different podcasts and a lot of people when they think about Ayahuasca, they think about Peru or Costa Rica, and I was really delighted to find that.
When you traveled in, in your famous, or as you say, infamous lare experiment, right? You decided to go to Columbia. Tell us why did you go to Columbia? And
Dennis McKenna: The reason for that is simple in some ways. So the reason we ended up going to Lara is that we were on a quest to find a particular exotic hallucinogen that we were, and back in those days, they called them hallucinogens.
Even we did, but we were trying to find this exotic hallucinogen, an orally active preparation made for virola, which is a species of tree that the sap contains high levels of tryptamines, and in many parts of the Amazon by the, it’s used as a snuff. The sap is extracted, dried, powdered, and used as a snuff, like the yet ma, for example, do this.
And, but. We were interested in the oral activity. So there was a paper by re Schulte. We were interested in DMT mainly, and we’d experimented with synthetic DMT, but it didn’t last long enough. So our motivation was to find a longer laxing form of DMT so that we could understand that space better.
And then this paper by Richard Schulte, the fil botanist, we stumbled across and it was called Varroa as an orally active hallucinogen. So we were aware of that paper and we decided, we thought maybe this is it. Maybe this is the secret that we’re looking for. We didn’t know about ayahuasca at that time.
1971, we knew about it. Not some people knew about it. Very few people knew that it was also an orally active form of DMT. The role of the admixture plants was not very well understood at that time. Schulte had graduate students and other people that were investigating it, but we didn’t really know the importance of, so we weren’t looking for ayahuasca.
We were looking for this witoto drug preparation, which was called, which they called.
And the reason we went to Lara is because that was the ancestral home of the Witoto people. So there was no particular mystery about going there. We just read in the paper, these are the people that have it and they live here.
It turns out Lara has a lot greater significance of that. But that was why we went to Lara. I was looking for this thing. We weren’t really looking for ayahuasca. We certainly weren’t looking for mushrooms. So when we got to Lara. It turned out that this little tiny mission village, they’d cleared pasture around the village, cleared all the forests, and they had pasture.
So they had all these sebu cattle grazing about 200 acres around the village, and it was a wet, rainy season, and pretty much out of every cow pie was growing. Huge clusters of CMY ensis, so we knew what that was. We had no experience, but we’d done our homework. We knew what it was, and our attitude toward that was very cavalier.
We thought these will be great. We can have fun with these. We looked at it totally as recreational experience while we’re waiting for the U Khe to show up the proper informant or find someone that could tell us about U Khe and the mushrooms. We started eating the mushrooms rather. Excessively and we were very cavalier and casual about it, but soon it got very serious ’cause they made it clear we were having these really intense sessions on pretty much a daily basis.
So we’d incorporated it into our diet and the mushrooms made it clear that they were the secret, they were what we’d really come for. And then, the whole story from that.
Sam Believ: Yeah. So I actually, I don’t think I finished the book, but I started reading the book by your brother about that experience where he mentions you also a lot and it’s interesting that you mentioned Richard Alvin short as well.
’cause you were reading his papers and he was the ethnobotanist that kinda recently in that time. Boosted the popularity of Ayahuasca. And it he was also exploring it in Columbia, but then something happened and probably Narcos happened and Columbia was overlooked for psychedelic tourism for better and for worse.
And, what I’m trying to do now is kind slowly bring more people to Columbia because it deserves to be si seen for this side of it. And rebranded from bad drugs to good drugs, from cocaine to Ayahuasca.
Dennis McKenna: There’s certainly, there’s as much as Peru or Ecuador, Brazil, or other places.
Ayahuasca’s been known and used in Columbia just as much, i, other than my trips to Lara and a couple of other trips I went to Columbia again in 1985 to meet my friend Louis, Eduardo Luna, who is from Columbia. He grew up in Florencia. And I went to visit him because he was, he had organized a conference on Ayahuasca at the world world Congress of what was it?
The world. I forget exactly what it was, but it was an anthropological conference, big one. And he’d ordered, he’d organized a satellite conference on Ayahuasca and invited me, and this was 1985. So I had just recently finished my PhD and published on it. So I went down there and presented my papers, but then we.
We went to Florencia and I visited his family and I, saw where he grew up. But then we continued on to Peru and did some field work there. So that was really my second time in Columbia. And I really haven’t been there since, I know. But I know it’s very, there, there’s a lot going on there and I’ve heard Columbia’s gotten, it’s really changed.
My I don’t have to tell you ’cause you’re from there, but for the better in many ways. Absolutely. My friend Wade Davis, who helped me, I’ve worked with for many years on different projects and he helped me organize this Coca Conference in February and in Peru. But he. Loves Columbia.
He’s even a Colombian citizen.
Sam Believ: They gifted him a citizenship after he wrote his book about Magdalena River. And I spoke to him a couple times. He’s supposed to come visit me and have an interview, but he’s very hard to catch.
Dennis McKenna: He’s hard to get and he travels a lot. Yeah. And, but he wrote a book about Columbia, mag River of Grebes.
Have you read it? I read it, yes. It is a wonderful book.
Sam Believ: It’s a wonderful book. And I learned a lot about history of Columbia. Yeah. From his book. So you talk in the Lare experiment, you started taking large quantities of those mushrooms and you were experimenting with sound, and then it was scientific, but then you, yourself considered there was somewhat s pseudoscientific.
In your presentation today, you talked about how. Many big discoveries were inspired by psychedelics the discovery of the helix of the DNA and and I forgot the first one, but even the modern computer age. A lot of people that created those the math necessary for this equations, they were inspired by LSD.
So what, how does one tell the difference between whether it’s real or not? Or maybe it’s real, but we’re not advanced enough yet to understand it. Just to talk to us about how did you know whether the science you were doing there with the mushrooms, was it real or was it not real? How does one tell a difference?
How did we know it? The sides we were doing with mushrooms. So you were ex lare experiment. You were trying to figure out the vibrations and the sound, and then you were taking mushrooms and then DMT, and you were. You were trying to create science, but then you said that it was not really science.
So
Dennis McKenna: it wasn’t really science, we thought it was, or we were under the delusion that we were doing science. What we were doing, I believe, was probably, we were creating a myth, in a certain, we were livid. We were visualizing a myth while we lived it. And that’s said it wasn’t really science.
And that, that’s one reason after Laira, I went back to school and that’s what led me to go into science, because I came back from LA with a strong feeling that I needed to learn how to do science, what science really was. My brother, his position was science will never explain what happened to us there.
So he just rejected science. He rejected it. Said, science is not up to the task of explaining what happened. And I was saying, wait a minute, we are not scientists. We may think we’re scientists, but we’re not scientists. Until we know how to do science, we should not reject science out of hand. You can’t just say that.
It’ll never explain it. So my own mission when I came back was and went back to school and I was only, I wasn’t even, I was a sophomore in college, second year of college. But I said, I’m gonna, I’m gonna study science, and I shifted my studies from, I was anthropology, comparative religion, sub botany, everything.
But I shifted much more toward the life sciences. I started studying biochemistry and chemistry and botany and all these things ’cause. I wanted to get a handle on something real because what we had been dealing with was very slippery because it wasn’t real. I wanted to get a firm grip on something real, and that was how do these drugs work?
What are the molecules, what’s the pharmacology and all that stuff. Really look at it from that level and not really the spiritual level or anything else. Not that I dismissed that at all, it’s just I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of these things, and I completed, I didn’t really have opportunity to do that.
I completed my studies at the University of Colorado. I got my degree. And then I went, I took a detour academically. I went to Hawaii and I studied, I got a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. And and then I got an opportunity to pursue my doctoral research at UBC in Canada. And after I finished in Hawaii in, and when I originally came to UBC, we had agreed that I was gonna study psilocybin in some respect.
I was gonna study mushrooms and study the biosynthesis in the enzymology and all that of psilocybin then. And that’s what I came there for. And I did that for about a year. But it was very frustrating for me. For one thing, I had a bad accident, bicycle accident when I first came. So I was in the hospital for a few weeks.
And and then the courses I was taking, I just transferred from Hawaii and with this accident and being stranger in a strange land, I didn’t know anybody. I was taking these very difficult courses and fungal genetics and mostly that was defeated and advanced organic chemistry and all that.
’cause I wanted to continue those studies and I was flailing a little bit. I was, this was not rewarding to me and I was, flailing and even failing these courses and having had the accident didn’t help either. My supervisor Neil Towers, who was very kind and a very perceptive fellow a real mentor, sense that I was having a difficult time and he said maybe you’d like to go to Peru for a while. I’ve got some extra money in the grant. Maybe I ought to, think about going down to Peru. And I basically said, yeah, my bags are packed. When do I leave? So I shifted my whole study from psilocybin to Ayahuasca at that point.
And my doctoral studies became a comparison between the biochem. So ayahuasca is an orally active DMT based preparation, right? And this virola preparation that we went to Lara in 71 different plants, but similar chemistry and similar mechanisms of action. So by thesis work by doctoral. Project became to compare these two, a comparative ethno pharmacological investigation of ayahuasca.
Its admixture plants and its chemistry compared to, and its plants of its chemistry. So that’s what I ended up doing for my for my graduate work. And and I published and because at Lara we had it, we didn’t really obtain U Coe. It took a long time. Eventually we found some, but when I went to Peru it was easy enough to get it because we went to Peru and we went to a place called PUCO Kio, which was a village on a river that was a tributary of the Amazon, the Rio Ku.
And it was the. Diaspora of the Witoto people in the Laro was their ancestral home, but early in the 20th century, they were forced out of there, and many of them relocated down to the area of Koki. Many of them were killed. There was, it was a horror, it was an atrocity, the trail from Lara to El Canto, which we walked, when we went to Lara, was built on the blood of slaves, Indians that were enslaved to build this road so they could transport rubber out of there for harvesting rubber.
So the Witoto people, culturally and everything else were highly impacted, really devastated, but a lot of them relocated down to the Rio Aku area and, so we knew that and we decided to go there to see if we could get ou. It was not so easy, even when we got to Lara, we had an anthropologist who highly discouraged us from trying to get this stuff.
‘Cause he said it’s their biggest shamonic secret. If you go in talking about it, they’re gonna go nuts. You’re not even supposed to know, you’re not even supposed to say anything. It’s the big secret, so we didn’t get it at Laira until some months later. Actually, Terrence returned to Laira that same year and eventually got it.
But so it was secret knowledge even at Laira and what we expected, and what we found was that when we went to the KU to look for it. It, it was a dying tradition. Manali was disappearing, but we did find people there, both the Witoto and Bora and Ani, their re, their culture related tribes and they all, and a lot of ’em said, yeah, I remember how my grandfather made this stuff, I know how to, I think I know how to do it.
And they were quite willing to make samples for us and, to the best of their ability as they remembered how to do it. It’s not rocket science, if you know the right trees and you know how to prepare it, you can get an active form of this kuey. So out of that, we had maybe four or five informants, people that prepared samples for us and and of course I’d bioassays some of them in the.
In the field, because if you’re an ethno pharmacologist, that’s what you do, right? You gotta a bioassay. That’s the job description. Some of them were active and some of them were active, and some of ’em were completely inactive, but we only had a total of seven or eight samples when I got those samples back to the lab, and I could look at the actual chemical profiles of those.
It all made sense, because unlike ayahuasca, VIRs chemically very, there’s a lot of variation. Even in the same species. You will not, you’ll find different alkaloid profiles. So it’s a more complicated picture, a little bit. But eventually, but I, and I collected on this graduate work, this field work.
Then the other side of my work was looking at ayahuasca. I collected many samples of ayahuasca from different practitioners. And there was one in particular Don Fidel in Alpa, that he was my first informant. Yeah, I spent time with him and he was happy to prepare samples and show us how it was made.
And so I, the idea is to get some samples in models and get ’em back to the laboratory, which I was able to do and publish the thesis. And, but that’s what made so that was my scientific work on Ayahuasca. But in the process, I took Ayahuasca quite a few times and discovered, I guess who might call this spiritual, the personal spiritual relationship with Ayahuasca, which lasted.
It’s not over. I still use Ayahuasca occasionally and respect it and and I think it’s a amazing medicine, and really should be more investigated. I’ve been involved, as you probably know, in this project that we did at Brazil called the wa the Wasco Project with the UDV.
You’re aware of this, you, I’ve heard that they
Sam Believ: did some studies, but I’m not on, yeah.
Dennis McKenna: In 1993, so I got my degree in 1984, and I did postdocs for a long time. Most of the eighties. I did postdocs, different places, not really working on any of this, but in 1993, I was invited to a 1991.
I was invited to a symposium. That was being organized by the UDV, which is the Brazilian church that uses ayahuasca as a sacrament. They call it
Sam Believ: like vegetable union or the name UDV, vegetable Union
Dennis McKenna: Vegetal. Yeah. That, that al And they use ayahuasca as a sacrament and they call Itasca. And which is basically Portuguese Trump’s literation, I think of Ayahuasca. But they invited me and some other investigators, including Ardal Luna, to a symposium a conference that they organized about ayahuasca in 1991.
And people came and presented their results and stuff that there were a lot of researchers. All 12 of us, there weren’t so many. We came and we gave our talks and so on. But, and then they said, and then we found out what they really were interested in was doing a biomedical study of ayahuasca.
And Eduardo and I had talked about this too previously, when we’d been in Peru, we thought in terms of we, context of our conversation was that we thought that Iowa skis were remarkable people, physiologically and mentally because they were, many of them are quite aged, but they were cognitively quite functional and healthy and strong and and they’d take ayahuasca all night and then they’d get up and chop trees all day.
And man, these people are super bad, and we thought this is worth looking into. And that was our naive sort of thing. But then, so we thought we need to do a biomedical study, but then. The logistics of doing a biomedical study in Peru were daunting. How do you get samples and how do you given the shamanic context, the ceremonial context, you can’t really approach these people and say could we have some blood samples?
Can we have some urine? No, because I think you’re a sorcerer. And that it’s tricky. So we said we’d like to do it, but it’s impossible. We don’t have access to refrigeration. Much less funding. We had no funding for it. But but when we went to, when I did the conference at UU, at, in, in Sao Paulo with the UDV.
It turned out that was their agenda. Really. That was their secret agenda. They wanted to get outside investigators to and do a biomedical study of Ayahuasca orca, as they called it, to Devin to find out more about how it worked, and hopefully to show that it was safe, and it was not dangerous.
There was the Brazilian drug Regulatory Agency, which was called, call it confin, like a combination of the DEA and the FDA in our country. There was a lot of discussion about whether ayahuasca is a public health menace and should it be banned and all that. So they wanted out time outside investigators with credentials to come in and investigate it and see if it was a dangerous thing or just get basic measurements.
Their hope was that. That we would be able to show that it wasn’t dangerous and it wasn’t toxic, which of course it’s not, so that part was easy, but we collected a lot of data and published that, and so at this 1991 conference they told us basically that was their agenda.
So we thought great. So we went back and tried to get some funding for it and and were able to get some funding. I was able to secure some funds from one of the Rockefellers among other Lawrence Rockefeller, who had, was actually enthusiastic about visionary plants. So we got enough money. We went back in 1993 and we did the biomedical study.
And then from that we published about eight papers came out over the next decade. Quite a, quite, it was the first. Real biomedical investigation of Ayahuasca. And it sparked the research that, if you look at PubMed now, I mean at that time there were less than a dozen articles about Ayahuasca and Pub Med, which is the National Library of Medicine resource for biomedical research.
If you look at Ayahuasca now on PubMed, there are over 600 studies. So it really triggered the research,
Sam Believ: amazing. Thank you for doing it because maybe if you didn’t, once again, because it’s going so, so much back in the past, maybe if you didn’t do them in those studies, it would not popularize, maybe I would never even learn about ayahuasca and never started my retreat and never started this podcast.
So it’s it’s really important, the work that you did earlier, and we shouldn’t take that.
Dennis McKenna: We know all about it. There’s a lot of work to be done left on ayahuasca. We really barely scratched the surface in some, I, we did this biomedical study, which was medically oriented than they had an agenda.
My orientation and interest really is more as an ethyl botanist. So I’m interested in, I’m interested in the physiology and all that, but I think the ethyl botany is, there’s still
Sam Believ: a lot we don’t know. So you mentioned something that is it’s not a rocket science once you know which are the right plants you mentioned in the, regarding ku or virola mixture.
But it’s a, it’s similar thing with ayahuasca. You talk about it a lot as well. How the hell do you think they figured out where were the right plans to mix it? People ask that question
Dennis McKenna: all the time. It’s not such a mystery as it turns out, it’s not such a mystery there.
One of our presenters at ESPD 50, in 2017, es still botanist, anthropologist named Manuel Torres who’s looked into this pretty extensively and he, I’ll send you the link to his talk. It wasn’t an accidental discovery. Exactly. Obviously trial and error was involved, but there was a certain era, a certain part of the VAs where peru, Columbia and basically Peru, Columbia and Brazil came together. It was a very active
kind of experimental ethyl pharmacology laboratory in some ways, you could say, not in any formal sense, but people were mucking around with plants and there was a lot of brewing going on. Cheecha making cheecha, right? They had snuffs, they had banisteriopsis, not necessarily using it together, but they had these plants.
They were using bear opsis medicinally. They were chewing the vine for dental health and that sort of thing. They had the snuffs containing the DMT. They had the very active chi culture and basically these chicha. The speculation is that these, the people that were making these different varieties, cheecha, it wasn’t one thing.
They dump all kinds of things into the cheecha. Occasionally, we have craft brewers here in Denver that’ll do the same thing. They’re always looking for the next flavor iteration or, the next formulation. These guys were experimental. Eventually they just got the right combination. They put some opposite in, and maybe one of the admixture plants, or maybe it was even virola, but they got, beta.
The basis of ayahuasca of pharmacology is the beta carboline that inhibit oxidase. And then DMT is activated. It’s orally activated. DMT is in lots of plants, so are beta Carlenes. They’re not that rare, and you’re in an environment where people are making this stuff and you’re in the middle of the Amazonian biodiversity.
So it’s not so surprising that they would combine these things. They might be familiar with the effects of snuff, for example. I don’t think there was, I don’t think they were thinking about this with the same mindset that a pharmacologist or a chemist would I, we would think of it in those terms.
You, but in a way, they were chemists, they were experimental pharmacologists. So they were just, let’s dump some of this in there. Let’s some dump something else, drink it, see what happens. Eventually they showed up with the right formula. Yeah. So it’s not such a, it’s not, the cure Deros will tell.
You ask them how do they know? And they will tell you the plants told us, but that’s not an answer really. That’s a myth the plants told us. Sure they told you, but how did they tell you,
Sam Believ: Maybe the same way they told about double Helix and the DNA, maybe there was, but yeah, that, like how do you get a psychedelic revelation without having a psychedelic compounds like the chicken and the eggs are?
Absolutely,
Dennis McKenna: and these were people immersed in the plant world. They were experimental, they were medicine people, and they had all the biodiversity of the Amazon to play around with. And eventually they just stumbled across it. I can tell you a story from bar. From my quest for the, when we went to the Rio Ku it was very remarkable in a way.
So we went there and we connected with these informants and they were saying always remember, don’t really, we don’t do it anymore. We don’t know, but I said, but they said, we know what the plants are. And so we went into the field with some of these guys and we collected plants, barks, and different, mostly bark, but other parts of it.
Then we’d ask them, is this the right species? Is this the one, is this forte? Is this not forte? And they’d say, yeah, this one’s no good. That one’s forte. That’s good. So we had, I don’t know, 15 or 20 different specimens that they’d done this.
Screening in the field with, and and they would look at it, they would taste it. They would smell it, and they’d look at the bark and taste it and they’d say, no forte, or not forte. And and so then when I got, so we had this sort of screening in the field when I got the samples back to the lab and could actually run it all through the gas chromatograph and so on, profile these things a hundred percent match, the samples they said were strong, had the alkaloids at high levels.
The ones they said weren’t strong either, didn’t have ’em at all or very low levels. So that’s a testimony. Testimony to the power of experimental ethyl pharmacology. These guys didn’t have gas chromatographs. They had taste and smell and experience of the organoleptic properties. So they could, they were very astute.
And you know about the doctrine of signatures and all that. Herbalist are very clever at intuiting the probable medicinal qualities of plants. And it’s often based on color is a factor, or, some plant, the leaf resembles a heart, so it’s good for your heart. This doctrine of signatures idea, or again, epileptic clues like tastes and smell.
And that’s how they do it. That’s how they put these formulas together.
Sam Believ: Amazing. Great great way to, to think about it. You wrote your thesis on you started working with mushrooms and then you switched to ayahuasca. So you’re the very right person to ask that question. And it’s the question I get asked all the time, what is the difference?
What is better? What is worse? Both pharmacologically, ethno, botanically. And from your personal experience, do you have a, do you have a
Dennis McKenna: favorite? It yeah. I wrote the paper, I and did the work and the course of doing that took ayahuasca quite a few times. And then when I worked with the UDV, even more ayahuasca has been a major, I guess plant ally, you could say with me.
Although I never formally I didn’t, I was not bailed to become an ayahuasquero. I wasn’t looking at, I was looking at it more from a scientific point of view, but I enjoyed taking ayahuasca and had profound experiences. It’s been a planned ally for forever, since that time.
Sam Believ: Yeah. I believe you’re very passionate about the topic of not separating the plants and medicinal tradition, medicinal plants and psychedelic plants. Not separating them from their tradition as in separating a plant from the roots. And you talk a lot about, the dangers of that, that we should not put them in the pill.
Can you talk to us a little bit about that, about separating the separating ayahuasca from Ayahuasca tradition, for example? I think, yeah,
Dennis McKenna: I think this is.
It is a difficult, it is a difficult thing because in some ways ayahuasca can benefit lots of people, whether they’re indigenous or not. When you start talking about intellectual property and all that, and indigenous knowledge and are we co-opting indigenous knowledge to make ayahuasca? Now ayahuasca is a global phenomenon.
There’s probably more ayahuasca being grown in Hawaii than there is in Peru. I would, I don’t know, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but there’s a lot of it. It’s inevitable. This kind of goes back to what we were talking about before. Plants are running things, the plants like to spread. One of the major agents of spreading are human beings, and that’s true of all plants.
Humans have always carried plants wherever they go. People talk about bio piracy and all that, but in a way that’s an exaggerate. That’s not really, that’s a tricky thing because that presumes in some ways that indigenous people assert and ownership of the plants and the knowledge and they don’t really have that attitude.
Or maybe some do, or maybe they are beginning to, because they’ve been informed by non-indigenous people that you know, you should be more protective of your plants and your knowledge. But they’re my limited experience. The people I’ve talked to who were by no means they weren’t all indigenous, but they were traditional healers, they love to share what they know.
They’re impressed that you’ve come. All this way to learn what they know about plants. They do not see that you’re there to steal their knowledge. They see that you’re there to learn from their knowledge. The problem is, I think Ayahuasca is one of the major, if you saw my talk and it talked about the GAAN ambassadors, I think Ayahuascan and mushrooms are one of the two main GAAN ambassadors that are trying to wake us up as a species.
Psilocybin is, there’s less of an issue because there are hundreds of species and they’re all over the world. Only a fraction have indigenous use. Potentially many more could be used there. You’re not contaminating any one’s tradition or stealing their knowledge because you could go to the forest with a mycologist and collect plants that have.
No indication of traditional use at all. And there you could use those. Ayahuasca has always seemed to be, it really is not used outside of a cultural context, so it’s much more tied up with cultural practices. And I you run an ayahuasca retreat center. I used to organize ayahuasca retreats in Peru.
I did that through most of, from about 2010 until fairly recently. And I’ve come to have mixed feelings about whether that was a good thing. I, the people that came down to my retreats, I saw people. I saw enormous healing. I saw enormous benefits for these people. They came, they were sincere.
They were looking for something. They came, I helped organize the retreats, and they benefited a great deal, and but we didn’t really, I didn’t really think about what, what was going on. On the other side of that was this contaminating the culture. Because these were people who were, by the very fact they were there means that they were privileged people who could afford to fly to Peru and pay, for accommodations and all that at fairly high end tourist locations and so on, and do ayahuasca.
So they were definitely not poor, not rich either. A lot of, some were rich, but they could do it. But the question of what was the impact on. On the culture in the typical village, before there was an ayahuasca tourism phenomenon, ayahuasca was just a person in the village who was the local healer.
He wasn’t, he probably had other means of making a living that sometimes maybe that was his living, but definitely part of the community and not a rich person. And just part of the community and then all these gringo start coming down and they want to drink with, the great shaman, the great iowasca.
So then some of these people get elevated in status and suddenly they’re superstars they can make in a single night what a lot of their villagers maybe they make in a month or a year, so suddenly they’re, they’re elevated in status. That’s gotta generate a lot of resentment to my, in their community.
And you can understand why that would be. This guy’s capitalizing on our traditions and sharing, not sharing the wealth. Maybe some Iowa girls do share the do you know the temple of the way of light in Peru I’ve heard about is, yeah, that is maybe one example of somebody that’s tried to do it, right?
They work with several shabo shaman and a lot of people come, but they say, I don’t know if it’s true, but they say they send a hundred percent of their profits back to their community. If they really do that’s great. That’s an ethical thing to do. There are many who don’t. I don’t know how your practices are.
I don’t, I’m not pointing any fingers at you.
Sam Believ: I can share how we do it and what we try to do, for example, at my retreat center is make it affordable. So it’s actually. You still need to fly and it’s expensive, but anyone, even with the minimal wage, can save up for that experience.
It’s it’s the cheapest one is like $600, so that, that helps. But of course it’s still a lot of money. But if you think about it, that some people, for them it’s a life saving experience then it’s worth it. We have an indigenous shaman and he does earn a lot of money and so he is very happy.
The money does trickle down back to the community because to grow ayahuasca, it requires a lot of labor and it creates a lot of employment. But of course he earns much more than the laborers there is definitely a risk, but I think the offset of it is there will be young children that would otherwise not touch this tradition, because it was almost in, in that society was almost made negative.
Oh, you’re drinking ayahuasca. Like they, they want to be more westernized. If they see that there is a financial incentive in it, they might wanna pursue it and then also become a challenge. And then it kinda, in a way, will preserve the tradition. But I’m the optimist because it’s let’s think about it from Western point of view.
You have a doctor, right? Doctor is a very difficult and very messy job. Yeah. If you would be making a minimum wage for being a doctor, would people become doctors? Maybe some, they’re very driven, but I think at the end of the day, we are financially incentivized. So I think I, and not that I think, I hope that there will be some way that it balances out and yes,
Dennis McKenna: It’s very tricky lately what I’ve been saying is instead of having people go to the medicine, find a way to bring the medicine to the people, to work with these communities to produce the medicine.
In a sustainable way than a way that this, that is sustainable for the plants and the community, that creates economic benefits for the growers as much as the eros, the people involved in this. And then find a legal mechanism to bring that medicine to North America or Europe or wherever they wanna bring it in the global north, and serve it up, and a community health and wellness center, a community center of some kind.
The problem is that this is currently legally risky. It shouldn’t be. It should not, it should also not be that difficult to develop legal mechanisms that would let these folks come with permission. And do this. Bring them, make the medicine, and bring the medicine and the practitioners to North America and let the benefits accrue, let the benefits trickle down, but be not having all these gringos running around, with fat wallets.
And it’s okay if they, and not all green rows are assholes. Mo most people that come to these retreats are pretty respectful. But there is that economic difference and some are not respectful. And so I’m trying to think that with this idea of symbiosis, we should try and articulate that everyone should have access to these medicines, but we should find a way to do it that honors the tradition that benefits the local people and that ensures an a sustainable source because iOS is endangered.
From over harvesting, at least in certain places.
Sam Believ: Absolutely. So when I talk to my shaman, for example, or when the group arrives, he always says the same thing. He says that he is just so happy that people from all over the world come here and they wanna learn from him and get healed by him.
And it’s a, it’s an honor, he says. And then, because in the past he had to travel all over the place and like he couldn’t be with his family. And it’s difficult. And I’ve been to the jungle with them, and they have a plantation of ayahuasca. So they don’t go to the forest to look for it.
They just plant it. So it’s pretty sustainable. So I do believe that a way it can be done well, but of course there’s still a lot that we need to figure out. You, me, you talked to, you mentioned topic of symbiosis again, and your talk was about the symbiosis and going back to nature.
Let’s touch this as a last topic. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about what you said on the talk, and then why we should go back to the nature.
Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think I don’t know how long you want this to be. I’m gonna have to go pretty soon but five more minutes, then we’re good.
As I said in the talk, and I think, so what’s happening with this psychedelic renaissance is you’ve got different factions. You, so you’ve got the indigenous people, you’ve got the capitalists, you’ve got the biomedical industrial complex that wants to develop these medicines, and they have good intentions.
They’re also capitalists. They wanna make money that’s just built into the equation. He don’t, it’s not terrible to make money as long as you do it ethically, but it’s, it’s a landmine, right? There are people that want to cash in on it and develop these. Patented products that maybe are probably not natural products, what may be related to natural products that they wanna patent and then they wanna control access and build a whole industry.
That’s the old, that’s the usual model in biomedicine. Now you’re trying to stuff psychedelics into that model and it’s very hard for to make that work, and that’s why I am advocating much more of a grassroots kind of thing. The work will go on, the research will go on, the investors will continue to make their investment and make discoveries and that’s fine.
You can’t stop it. So you may as well not even think about, but the rest of people, I think, should rely on develop liaisons and relationship between community. Resource, basically wisdom centers in the north that could stablish these relationships with similar places in the south and and do it that way.
Do it from a grassroots perspective. So that I, what I would like to see with both psilocybin, them and Ayahuasca and some of these others, is that every community might have a wellness center, or a health alternative health center. A lot of ’em do. They could just put, integrate psychedelics into the menu.
And that’s something you could do. So you could go for a weekend and you could take ayahuasca, bring the kids, hang out, do a little yoga, do some nutritional counseling, integrate it into a general practice of integrated healthy practices. So you you fit it into that and you minimize the harm and then it’s not seen as this kind of alien thing from another culture that you’re inserting.
It’s a more natural thing than it grows into. So that’s what I’d like to see. I think it should be I definitely think it should be available to people and in someplace like, and in some places it is, in a place like Hawaii, there’s a lot of ayahuasca being grown in Hawaii and a lot of people serving ayahuasca and all that.
Sam Believ: So that you or your brother, that brother Ayahuasca from Peru to We did Hawaii.
Dennis McKenna: Yeah, we did. So you see it, it’s there you go. Bio piracy, right? So now, yeah, ayahuasca loves Hawaii. We didn’t intentionally mean to introduce an invasive play. Because Hawaii is very sensitive about that kind of thing.
But if you’re gonna plant, you’re gonna introduce them to VA planet. It may as well be Iowa.
Sam Believ: Yes.
Dennis McKenna: So it’s a tricky thing. Amazing. But we have to recognize this is this is also co-evolution. It really is co-evolution and co-evolution works on timescales that are different than ours.
It’s, we have to look ahead. It’s not about what happens this year, or five years, or 10 years from now. We have to try to envision this situation 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, it could transform the world and it could do it in a good way. Or it could. And, the world’s in trouble.
And, the environmental crisis is quite real. And they have to ask your question, how long is the Earth’s stability going to be maintained? Because, human activity, our thoughtlessness and stupidity is really undermining the symbiotic mechanisms that keep the planet stable. And how, at what point do you reach the tipping point where you say it’s too late, it’s, it cannot be repaired?
I think we’re very close to that. And, the policies of the people that supposedly should be doing the most about it, nothing’s being done. It’s all based on denial. You can’t even talk about climate change, so we’re being, really, we could talk about all the terrible geopolitical things that are happening, all the wars and all this, the rise of fascism and everything, and that’s what we tend to be focused on.
But over all of that, what’s not getting talked about is climate change and the destruction of the symbiotic structures, the feedback loops that keep the composition of the air and the oceans and all this in balance. It’s not even talked about. They’re very resilient. The earth has been through tremendous changes over the course of billions of years, and it will survive.
We not, may not survive, but it will survive. But it will be a changed earth. And that’s the way it works. Yeah.
Sam Believ: Let’s hope before we destroy ourselves we’ll be able to give ayahuasca to world leaders, policy makers, and they understand what the hell they’re doing. And maybe they will. I would act it’s like a, it’s a very optimistic thing, but that’s kinda what I hope for.
Dennis McKenna: That’s what I hope for too. But get them to do it. That’s the problem. I’m working on it. I would to I’d like nothing more than to force feed Ayahuasca to Donald Trump, yeah, absolutely. It’s never gonna happen, and it’s not gonna work. In a way, let’s never say never Donald, if you’re listening your time is come.
I had a at Ayahuasquero that I worked with in Peru who said there are two kinds of people I won’t give Ayahuasca because it won’t help them. One is schizophrenics. And I’m not so sure he is right about that. But the other is sociopaths. He said, I won’t give ayahuasca to sociopaths because it won’t help them.
Because they will next day they’ll say they’re a
Sam Believ: shaman. Yeah. Exactly. Then say, I don’t wanna take more of your time. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Great conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for your contribution. ’cause once again you did so many small things, arguably small from then.
It’s like you see the result of not Hawaii being full of ayahuasca and people growing their own mushrooms. So you’re a legend and it’s been a pleasure. It’s been a
Dennis McKenna: pleasure for me too. Thank you. Thank you. If you ever find yourself in Canada, you. Let me know and if you
Sam Believ: ever want to visit Columbia again, I would love to show you my, I would love to.
Where are you based? We’re based one hour south of Meine, south of Medi Mein, Columbia. Yeah, it’s very beautiful. I’ll, it’ll probably happen. Absolutely. Let’s do it. Yeah. Guys, you’ve been listening to, I Ask a podcast. As always, we the host, Sam, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
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