The
ink continues to flow on the clear benefits of ayahuasca therapy and it is
apparent that we have a developing boomlet that is even in the hands of pure
amateurs, appears safe enough. Certainly
there is now plenty of guidance on the internet so no one will be
surprised,. Yet for those who suffer
mental dysfunction please have an experienced guide along.
Conjecture:
1
Ayahausca
provides a clear and manageable protocol to objectively observing and managing
mental illness. This has never been
possible and we can expect a new symbolic language to emerge.
2
Ayahausca
also opens the door into communion with the Ubermind or universal consciousness
sufficiently to recover a great deal of information or at least theoretical frameworks. Note the observation of the activity of
chlorophyll.
Obviously
this is a huge breakthrough just now attracting serious research. The initial focus will remain with addiction
remediation.
Tracy James knew
the drug she'd just swallowed was working when her old injuries from high
school started twitching with new life. Pressure throbbed from a forgotten
busted knee. Her ankle tingled. The fingers she'd sprained roller-skating
decades back began to ache. Whatever the 37-year-old had just taken, it shot
feeling back into the long-gone ailments.
"When I did vomit, it was one of the most amazing moments of
my life."
For the past 45 minutes,
the hut had been dark and silent, the air dripping with jungle moisture. James
and nearly 20 others were sitting cross-legged on ornate rugs. One by one, a
pair of Shipibo shamans peered into the face of each visitor, ceremonial chants
slipping from their lips.
It
was June 2009. James, a pretty, curly-haired Jamaican-American woman, was then
calling Los Angeles home. As a life coach, she was interested in rewiring the
mind-body split. A friend had suggested she make the trip to the Peruvian
jungle, where the indigenous tribes had a powerful liquid that could radically
shake up one's consciousness. Now, James was miles into the bush surrounding
the town of Iquitos.
Her first dose of the nasty, rust-colored liquid was blasting through her
system.
Waves
of nausea began crashing over James. Strange geometric shapes filled her
vision. Around her, some people sobbed. Others threw up into buckets. James
left the wooden hut topped with a thatched roof for the outhouse. The diarrhea
hit so frequently, she just sat outside in a chair, feeling weak and
terrible. Oh my gosh, she cringed, waiting
for the next bout.
Two Shipibo women — tiny
people with sun-cured faces wearing the tribe's traditional sky-blue shirts —
approached. As one chanted, the other woman placed her mouth against the
alarmed James' stomach. The shaman began sucking out the bad energy, a practice
known as chupa. After 20 minutes, James was amazed to feel great. She walked
back into the hut, was hit with another wall of nausea, and puked.
"When I did vomit,
it was one of the most amazing moments of my life," she says today.
"After all that purging, I just had this amazing feeling of peace."
The
psychoactive brew goes by many names.William
S. Burroughs and Allen
Ginsbergcalled it yagé. In Brazil, it's known as hoasca.
Other aliases include the Spirit Vine, the Vine of the Soul, and the Vine of
the Dead.
Its most common name is
ayahuasca. The indigenous cultures of the Amazon have brewed the plant
concoction, with its naturally occurring dose of the hallucinogen DMT
(N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), for centuries. It is generally prepared in a brew
made from the vine of a species called Banisteriopsis caapi.
In
recent years, the West has caught on. The tea cropped up in the Jennifer
Aniston flick Wanderlust and the Showtime series Weeds; proponents include everyone from Sting to The Howard Stern Show's Robin
Quivers. This, despite the fact that it's mostly
illegal here. Possessing the plants is OK, but concoctions made from it are
banned, except in religious ceremonies, because DMT is a Schedule I drug.
Still, one ayahuasca expert estimates that on any given night, 50 to 100
ayahuasca groups are in session in New York City alone, and a new, burgeoning
business in the States is organizing drug excursions toPeru,
where the substance is legal.
Some
of the same doctors and researchers who have, in recent years, gotten FDAapproval for breakthrough studies involving MDMA and
psilocybin mushrooms are now turning their attention to ayahuasca. Preliminary
work suggests the brew could help treat depression, chronic addiction, and
fears of mortality. People with less-defined diagnoses but a hunger for
something missing say ayahuasca offers something ineffable: compassion,
connectedness, spirituality.
"Ayahuasca
is penetrating American society, and its highly successful people, way more
than any other psychedelic," says Rick Doblin,
head of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for
Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit research association based
in Santa
Cruz, California. "The number of people who
have had incredible experiences with ayahuasca, if they could all surface in
the public sphere at the same time, it would be absolutely astonishing."
In
a greenhouse at the University
of Minnesota, Dennis
McKenna walks past the cacao (chocolate) and the
Punica (pomegranate) and strides straight to the back corner, where the vines
of the plant Banisteriopsis have twisted around each other — and nearby
electrical cords — to reach the room's rafters.
McKenna, a white-bearded
professor wearing wire glasses and a denim shirt tucked into his jeans, points
at one of the younger vines, a supple green stem the width of a pencil.
"This is
nothing," he says, explaining that mature plants can reach 1,500 feet and
weigh several tons. "Usually, the part you use is the thickness of a
finger."
McKenna would know: He
has drunk ayahuasca several hundred times since 1981. An ethnobotanist and
ethnopharmacologist by trade, McKenna first tangled with psychedelics as a teen
coming of age in the '60s. He tried everything from LSD to jimsonweed but never
ayahuasca: There was none.
"It was this rare,
legendary thing," McKenna remembers.
The
first record of ayahuasca arrived in the West in 1908, thanks to British
botanist Richard
Spruce, who mostly described lots of vomiting. Harvard ethnobotanist Richard
Evan Schultes followed up a half-century later with the
first academic account. Around the same time, Beat author William Burroughs
wrote letters depicting his quest for the tea to Allen Ginsberg, collected in
1963 as The Yage Letters. But in
Western literature, there wasn't much more than that.
Seeking
to change that, McKenna embarked on his first trip to South
America at age 20. A decade later, he returned,
this time to research his dissertation. After months in the jungle, he brought
plant samples back to his lab, where he showed for the first time how ayahuasca
works.
To make the brew,
shamans boil together two Amazonian plants for many hours, sometimes days. As
they simmer, the DMT contained in one of the plants mixes with the other one,
the Banisteriopsis vine, and its key ingredient: monoamine oxidase inhibitors,
or MAOIs. Normally when people ingest DMT — a not-uncommon compound in nature —
the monoamine oxidase in our gut knocks it out. But the Banisteriopsis allows
the hallucinogen to reach the brain.
By
the middle of the 20th Century, several Brazilian churches splintered off from
the shamans and took ayahuasca into a formal setting. In 1991, one of these — a
group called the Uniao do Vegetal, or UDV — invited McKenna to one of its
twice-monthly ceremonies during which the tea is administered as a sacrament.
(A New Mexico-based branch of the church won a 2006 U.S.
Supreme Court case allowing it to use ayahuasca in its
ceremonies. The church has about 300 members in six U.S. states, including a
group in Florida.)
In a room with 500 other
people, McKenna drank first one cup, then a second, and was plunged into one
of the most vivid ayahuasca visions of his life: a molecule's-eye view of photosynthesis
or, as he explains it, "the force on which life depends."
When
McKenna returned to his body, he writes in his new book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, "I knew that
I had been given an inestimable gift."
McKenna
began devising a study to look at the biomedical effects of ayahuasca, and
within two years, he was back in Brazil. On this trip, he brought along a team
that included Dr.
Charles Grob, a psychiatrist who heads the Division of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry at UCLA's medical school.
"Nowadays, the word
is out," Grob says. "But when we did this, I'd say, 'We're doing an
ayahuasca study,' and people would say, 'Aya-what-sca?'"
For about a month in the
summer of 1993, the team of the Hoasca Project ran tests on 15 randomly
selected members of the church, all of them men who had been using ayahuasca
regularly for at least ten years. The scientists ran the same tests on
similarly aged men who had never been exposed to ayahuasca.
The researchers measured
every biological metric they could think of — blood pressure, heart rate, pupil
dilation, body temperature — and used structured psychiatric interviews to get
where their instruments couldn't: inside the participants' minds.
Many of the men had struggled
with alcoholism and depression prior to joining the church, Grob learned. They
credited ayahuasca with transforming their outlook. "In some cases,"
Grob says, "they felt like it had saved their lives."
When the researchers
left Brazil and started processing their data, the bloodwork came back with one
of the project's most startling discoveries: The long-term ayahuasca users
showed higher levels of the transporters of serotonin, the brain chemical that
regulates mood.
"That's the target
that antidepressants work on, and here it was significantly elevated in the
drinkers [of ayahuasca]," McKenna says.
Deficits in serotonin
transporters are also connected to problems like alcoholism and depression —
the same issues the 15 subjects said the ayahuasca had helped cure.
"Here we have a
medicine that apparently reverses these deficits, something no other medicine
is known to do," explains McKenna. "And there's also a correlation to
behavioral change. You can't say it caused it, but there's definitely a correlation."
Today, 20 years after
the study, McKenna is preparing to revisit the findings. Within a year, he
aims to raise enough money to fund a new study, this time in Peru, to look at
the effects of ayahuasca on people with posttraumatic stress disorder.
He hopes that additional
research will help him establish his ultimate goal: a destination medical
clinic in Peru.
"If we can bring
together the best of shamanism and the best of psychotherapy, I think we can
offer a new paradigm for healing," says McKenna. "What we're really
trying to do here is revolutionize psychiatry."
Lisa Yeo doesn't
look like a junkie. The 47-year-old has shimmering blond hair
and clear skin and wears a stylish tangerine shirt. It's Halloween, and her two
dogs — a shih tzu and a dachshund — yap incessantly as trick-or-treaters come
to the door of her house in Toronto.
Just eight years ago,
she weighed 80 pounds and was missing her two front teeth.
Yeo's father gave her
her first alcoholic drink at age 6, and she was drinking alone by age 11. As a
teen, she developed a cocaine addiction, and in her early 20s, she set out on a
path that would take her to heroin, crack, and prostitution.
On August 11, 2005, as
cops walked her out of a hotel where they had found her shooting up, Yeo
realized she was finally ready to change.
She
went to rehab for a year, then a recovery house for another two years. But she
still wasn't totally sober: For 18 years, she'd been receiving a court-ordered
dose of the opiate substitute methadone.
Now, she wanted off all drugs, once and for all.
As Yeo reduced her dose,
her body started breaking down. Doctors told her that quitting the methadone
was dangerous and advised her to just accept it as a fact of her life. To Yeo,
the thought of staying on methadone was unbearable, and she began contemplating
suicide.
"I told him this
big, long story, and at the end of it, he said, 'Lisa, I think I can offer you
a potential way out of this,'" Yeo remembers. "It was just like,
'Really?'"
First, Yeo spent a
summer at a treatment clinic in Mexico, where she used other traditional plant
medicines, iboga and ibogaine, to help wean her body off opiates. By October
2012, Yeo was ready for step two and boarded another plane to Mexico, this time
for a weeklong ayahuasca retreat.
The night of her first
ceremony, Yeo walked onto a round platform with a roof open to the jungle
around it. Not long after she drank — "it tasted bitter, but it didn't
taste as bad as some of the things I'd ingested in my life" — Yeo began to
feel something prodding at her liver, damaged by hepatitis C.
"I felt what I
thought of as a vine going into the area where I had the pain and circle,
circle, circle," Yeo remembers. "Then there would be this release,
and the pain would be gone."
The night of the second
ceremony, Yeo's experience shifted: This time, she saw a slideshow of people
who had shown her kindness, "babysitters to social workers to prison
guards," Yeo remembers. "It was like flash cards, and at the very end
was my mom."
Yeo has since done a
second ayahuasca retreat with Mate and credits the vine with helping her
discover who she is without substances.
"It has given me a
go-to place of safety and a knowing of how to be gentle with myself when any
tormenting thoughts creep in," Yeo says. "It just lifts the trauma;
it lifts the pain."
Treatment
for addiction disorders is one of the most promising areas of therapeutic
ayahuasca use, in part because doctors still don't have many
other good options.
"Someone walks in
your office today, you're going to basically say the same thing your
predecessor might have said 50 or 60 years ago, which is, 'Find a 12-step
group, and if you're lucky and it's a good fit, maybe it will help,'"
explains Grob. "Otherwise, we don't have a whole hell of a lot to
offer."
The psycho-spiritual
experiences that ayahuasca provides — "like a mystical-level state,"
Grob says — seem to offer an effect similar to that of certain faith-based
aspects of 12-step groups: showing addicts that there is a power greater than
themselves.
When
Mate first heard of ayahuasca, he had recently published his book on
addictions, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. People
kept writing him, asking if he knew about "this weird plant," Mate
remembers. Eventually, he decided to try it himself.
During his first
retreat, Mate saw the connection to treating addiction right away.
"The ayahuasca
experience just dissolved my defenses," he says. "I experienced a
deep sense of love, tears of joy racing down my face."
Mate began organizing
retreats of his own. He brought in shamans to lead the ceremonies and used his
own training to help participants prepare for, process, and integrate what they
experienced.
"It's not a
question of 'Here's a drug that's going to fix you,'" Mate explains.
"It's 'Here's a substance under the effect of which you'll be able to do a
kind of self-exploration that otherwise might not be available to you or
otherwise might take you years to get to.'"
In
2011, a Canadian First Nations community contacted Mate to treat some tribe
members with chronic substance-dependence problems. Mate agreed and in June
arrived at a remote village for the first of two retreats. A team of
researchers, led by addiction specialist Dr.
Gerald Thomas, came along.
Since Grob and McKenna's
study in 1993, some limited research had been done on ayahuasca: Scientists had
performed brain scans of ayahuasca users and administered freeze-dried
ayahuasca in a lab. But no one had followed up on ayahuasca's therapeutic
potential. Thomas and his team were ready to continue the work.
The group set up in the
tribe's longhouse, a spacious wooden structure with a stove in the middle and
straw on the floor. Twelve members were participating in the first ceremony,
and that night, before they drank, Mate led them in conversation about their
addictions.
"When they were
talking about trauma, for many of them, that was the first time they ever
shared that with anybody," Mate says. "They were entering into deep
pain."
Before the retreat,
Thomas and his team administered psychiatric evaluations to measure the 12
participants on factors like hope, quality of life, mindfulness, and emotional
regulation. After the ceremony, researchers repeated the tests — first two
weeks later, then four weeks, then once per month for half a year.
The
results, which they published in June of this year in the journal Current Drug Abuse Reviews, came
back promising. Alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine use decreased among the
participants. On the psychological surveys, the subjects' quality-of-life
scores increased, as did the ratings for mindfulness, empowerment, outlook, and
hopefulness.
At the six-month mark,
the team also interviewed 11 of the study participants and asked them to rate
the experience on a scale from one to ten. The mean response came back at 7.95.
One 30-year-old man told the researchers, "With my last experience with
the ayahuasca, I really faced myself. Like, my fear, my anger. Which really, I
think is a big part of my addictions... I wish I was introduced to it like 20
years ago. It could have saved me a lot of time and trouble."
Tracy
James' experience with ayahuasca didn't end with that first night in the
jungle. The L.A. life coach's retreat lasted
another 12 days. She went through multiple ceremonies, punishing repeats of
that first gut-churning episode.
However, she also had
vivid visions. In one, she went on a quest for a gold ring hidden underwater.
In another, a beautiful woman told her she was calling James back home. Once,
James imagined she was greeted by a group of elfin-like creatures. There, she felt
the comfort of home, of belonging. Still, once the retreat was over, she never
wanted to take ayahuasca again.
"I had a lot of
ceremonies that were really hard," she says.
But back home, similar
dreams filled her head at night. That feeling of belonging, of being home — she
began to see it as a signal. When the opportunity came up to study with the
same Shipibo shamans, she signed on.
Today,
James is based out of Fort Myers.
With a business partner, she runs AyaIntegral (ayaintegral.com).
Two or three times a year, the pair leads a group down to Peru for 12-day
retreats with Shipibo shamans. Customers pay around $2,600 for the total
ayahuasca experience. "People say it's like a year of therapy in a night,
and it's no joke," she says today.
The increase in such
ayahuasca tourism has morphed Iquitos, Peru, into a boomtown on the Amazon
Basin. In 2012, 250,000 visitors traveled through the once-sleepy inland port —
many searching for the magic drug.
Today
at the Iquitos airport, travelers are as likely to be offered ayahuasca — or at
least canisters of a dubious brown liquid — as a taxi. The stuff so thoroughly
permeates the city that a New York Times travel
dispatch from September opens, "Before we begin, a disclaimer: In Iquitos,
Peru, your correspondent did not consume the shamanic hallucinogen
ayahuasca."
The
influx of tourists seeking transcendence has brought with it new problems. WhenJoshua
Wickerham, a sustainability consultant, was invited to a
conference on psychedelics in Oakland, California, this April, he got an
earful.
"The people in the
ayahuasca community were talking about all of these issues, as ayahuasca is becoming
this global phenomenon," Wickerham recalls. "There were so many
people from so many walks of life saying, 'There is so much good happening
here, but there are also real problems.'"
An
idea was born: a kind of TripAdvisor for ayahuasca centers. In early November,
Wickerham launched the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council as
a nonprofit devoted to assuring the sustainability and safety of traditional
plants like ayahuasca. Wickerham envisions the ESC developing, with the
community's input, into a consensus certification model.
"I think the ESC
can help educate the seekers," Wickerham says, "so there's some way
to differentiate when there's a neophyte who lands at the Iquitos airport and
asks the cabdriver, 'Where should I go for ayahuasca?'"
As far as psychedelics
go, studies show that ayahuasca is on the relatively safe side. For it to be
lethal, a user would have to take about 20 times more than the standard ceremonial
dose. (For alcohol, that number is ten times more than a normal serving.) Brain
scans of ayahuasca users indicate that the brew doesn't have a neurotoxic
effect.
"The knee-jerk
reaction is to say, 'Oh, it's a dangerous hallucinogen,' but look at the actual
mortality rate," says McKenna. "If you look at the number of people
who die from adverse reactions to aspirin, ayahuasca is considerably
safer."
The main risks are
psychological, proponents say. "That's where a good shaman comes in,"
says McKenna.
But in the Wild West
that is Iquitos, it can be hard to tell which shamans are the real deal. Some
serve a counterfeit brew laced with the witchcraft-associated plant known as
toé. Others have impure intentions.
In
the ayahuasca community, there's a collection of well-known horror stories: the
German woman who returned from Peru with a report of being sexually assaulted
by her "shaman." The two French citizens who died during their trip —
one from a heart attack, the other from a likely interaction with his
prescription medications. The worst, though — the story held up as a warning to
those who seek blindly — is the story of an 18-year-old Californian named Kyle Nolan.
Nolan
set out for the Shimbre Shamanic Center, a Peruvian ayahuasca lodge run by a
shaman calling himself Mancoluto, in August 2011. When Nolan never showed up
for his flight home, his worried parents went to Peru to find him. First,
Mancoluto claimed that Nolan had taken off in the middle of the night, but his
body was later found in a grave on the center's property. No one has yet been
charged.
To
Wickerham, stories like this illustrate why the ESC is necessary. He hopes to
work with the governments of countries like Peru and Ecuador to
show them that they don't have to resort to heavy-handed regulatory legislation
— that the community can monitor itself.
"I hope we can
prevent another tragedy."
When Dr. Brian Rush started
a crowdfunding campaign for ayahuasca research,
he didn't know what to expect.
The campaign for ATOP —
the Ayahuasca Treatment Outcomes Project — launched on Indiegogo in August
2013. By the time it closed in October, Rush and his team had raised $34,000
from 450 people. Some of them, Rush says, had personal experiences with
ayahuasca; others had been touched by addiction; still more were simply
intrigued.
Most interesting of all
was the support from doctors.
"I got notes from
physicians and psychiatrists in the U.S. and Canada who have been using
ayahuasca under the table in clinical practice and really support this
work," says Rush. "I don't think I expected that."
Rush, an addiction
researcher with a doctorate in public health, first heard of ayahuasca in 2011
and decided to travel to Peru to learn more. He checked into an ayahuasca
center called Takiwasi and, during a ceremony, confronted his 20-year addiction
to nicotine.
"I was laid flat
out in a coffin, and my three children were standing around me," says
Rush. "Then I started purging, and it felt like I was purging the tobacco
poison."
Not long after Rush
returned home, he gave up smoking for good.
"I had quit before,
but this time was different," he says. "It's like I have no memory of
smoking. I don't have any tactile memory in my hands. That was a year and a
half ago, and I haven't had a cigarette."
Having studied addiction
science for 30 years, Rush asked the Takiwasi center what data it had. The
answer was: not much. When he realized that other, similar programs also lacked
decent evaluation data, he decided to change that.
"I said, 'I am in
your service,'" he recalls.
The Indiegogo campaign
funded the project team's first planning meeting, the kickoff of a study that
will be several years long. The meeting took place in Peru at the end of
October and brought together 40 international researchers to help design the
project.
They decided that ATOP
will be an umbrella over studies in several South American countries, each
looking at ayahuasca in the treatment of drug and alcohol abuse. By the end,
the researchers hope to have definite answers on whether addicts treated with
ayahuasca see a verifiable reduction in alcohol- and drug-related harms.
"It's real clear
that all we have now is kind of anecdotal evidence and small studies with
short-term follow-up," says Rush. "This is a potential approach that
a lot of people have some confidence in, and at least enough confidence to say,
'We need more studies. We need to know more.'"
