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THE SECRET LIFE of PLANTS It, They Felt They Were Receiving Impor- Tant Information Directly from the Plants the Green-Juice Generation Finds Its Drug of Choice

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THE SECRET LIFE of PLANTS It, They Felt They Were Receiving Impor- Tant Information Directly from the Plants the Green-Juice Generation Finds Its Drug of Choice vines growing in the jungle. Taken to- DEPT. OF PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY gether, the drugs produced hallucina- tions that the brothers called “vege- table television.” When they watched THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS it, they felt they were receiving impor- tant information directly from the plants The green-juice generation finds its drug of choice. of the Amazon. The McKennas were sure they were BY ARIEL LEVY on to something revelatory, something that would change the course of human history. “I and my companions have been selected to understand and trig- ger the gestalt wave of understanding that will be the hyperspacial zeitgeist,” Dennis wrote in his journal. Their work was not always easy. During one ses- sion, the brothers experienced a flash of mutual telepathy, but then Dennis hurled his glasses and all his clothes into the jungle and, for several days, lost touch with “consensus reality.” It was a small price to pay. The “plant teachers” seemed to have given them “access to a vast database,” Dennis wrote, “the mystical library of all human and cosmic knowledge.” If these sound like the joys and haz- ards of a bygone era, then you don’t know any ayahuasca users—yet. In the de- cades since the McKennas’ odyssey, the drug—or “medicine,” as many devotees insist that it be called—has become in- creasingly popular in the United States, to the point where it’s a “trendy thing right now,” as Marc Maron said recently to Susan Sarandon, on his “WTF” pod- cast, before they discussed what she’d learned from her latest ayahuasca expe- Ayahuasca, used for centuries in South American jungles, is booming in the U.S. rience. (“I kind of got, You should just keep your heart open all the time,” she he day after Apollo 14 landed and we had decided to put all of our said. “Because the whole point is to be T on the moon, Dennis and Terence chips on the psychedelic experience.” open to the divine in every person in McKenna began a trek through the Am- They started hiking near the border the world.”) azon with four friends who considered of Peru. As Dennis wrote, in his mem- The self-help guru Tim Ferriss told themselves, as Terence wrote in his book oir “The Brotherhood of the Scream- me that the drug is everywhere in San “True Hallucinations,” “refugees from a ing Abyss,” they arrived four days later Francisco, where he lives. “Ayahuasca society that we thought was poisoned in La Chorrera, Colombia, “in our long is like having a cup of coffee here,” he by its own self-hatred and inner con- hair, beards, bells, and beads,” accompa- said. “I have to avoid people at parties tradictions.” They had come to South nied by a “menagerie of sickly dogs, cats, because I don’t want to listen to their America, the land of yagé, also known monkeys, and birds” accumulated along latest three-hour saga of kaleidoscopic as ayahuasca: an intensely hallucino- the way. (The local Witoto people were colors.” genic potion made from boiling woody cautiously amused.) There, on the banks Leanna Standish, a researcher at the Banisteriopsis caapi vines with the glossy of the Igara Paraná River, the travellers University of Washington School of leaves of the chacruna bush. The broth- found themselves in a psychedelic par- Medicine, estimated that “on any given ers, then in their early twenties, were adise. There were cattle pastures dotted night in Manhattan, there are a hun- grieving the recent death of their mother, with Psilocybe cubensis—magic mush- dred ayahuasca ‘circles’ going on.” The and they were hungry for answers about rooms—sprouting on dung piles; there main psychoactive substance in aya- the mysteries of the cosmos: “We had were hammocks to lounge in while you huasca has been illegal since it was listed sorted through the ideological options, tripped; there were Banisteriopsis caapi in the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, 30 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 ILLUSTRATION BY BJØRN LIE but Standish, who is the medical direc- land. They planted it in the forest, and tor of the Bastyr Integrative Oncology it happened to like the forest—a lot. So Research Center, recently applied for now it’s all over the place.” permission from the F.D.A. to do a Terence McKenna died in 2000, af- Phase I clinical trial of the drug—which ter becoming a psychedelic folk hero she believes could be used in treatments for popularizing magic mushrooms in for cancer and Parkinson’s disease. “I am books, lectures, and instructional cas- very interested in bringing this ancient sette tapes. Dennis McKenna went on medicine from the Amazon Basin into to get a doctorate in botany and is now the light of science,” Standish said. She a professor at the University of Minne- is convinced that “it’s going to change sota. When we spoke, he was on a book the face of Western medicine.” For now, tour in Hawaii. He had been hearing though, she describes ayahuasca use as about ayahuasca use in a town on the a “vast, unregulated global experiment.” Big Island called Puna, where people Most people who take ayahuasca in call themselves “punatics.” “Everybody the United States do so in small “cere- is making ayahuasca, taking ayahuasca,” monies,” led by an individual who may he said. “It’s like the Wild West.” call himself a shaman, an ayahuasquero, a curandero, a vegetalista, or just a healer. f cocaine expressed and amplified This person may have come from gen- I the speedy, greedy ethos of the nine- erations of Shipibo or Quechua sha- teen-eighties, ayahuasca reflects our pres- mans in Peru, or he may just be some- ent moment—what we might call the one with access to ayahuasca. (Under- Age of Kale. It is a time characterized by qualified shamans are referred to as wellness cravings, when many Ameri- “yogahuascas.”) Ayahuasca was used for cans are eager for things like mindful- centuries by indigenous Amazonians, ness, detoxification, and organic pro- who believed that it enabled their holy duce, and we are willing to suffer for our men to treat physical and mental ail- soulfulness. ments and to receive messages from Ayahuasca, like kale, is no joy ride. ancestors and gods. Jesse Jarnow, the The majority of users vomit—or, as they author of “Heads: A Biography of Psy- prefer to say, “purge.” And that’s the chedelic America,” told me, “It’s a bit easy part. “Ayahuasca takes you to the less of a to-do in many of its traditional swampland of your soul,” my friend uses—more about healing specific mal- Tony, a photographer in his late fifties, adies and illnesses than about address- told me. Then he said that he wanted ing spiritual crises.” Now, though, aya- to do it again. huasca is used as a sacrament in syncretic “I came home reeking of vomit and churches like the Santo Daime and the sage and looking like I’d come from União do Vegetal (“union of the plant”), hell,” Vaughn Bergen, a twenty-seven- both of which have developed a pres- year-old who works at an art gallery in ence in the United States. The entire Chelsea, said of one ayahuasca trip. “Ev- flock partakes, and the group trip is a eryone was trying to talk me out of doing kind of congregational service. it again. My girlfriend at the time was, The first American to study aya- like, ‘Is this some kind of sick game?’ huasca was the Harvard biologist Rich- I was, like, ‘No. I’m growing.’ ” His next ard Evans Schultes, who pioneered the experience was blissful: “I got trans- field of ethnobotany (and co-authored ported to a higher dimension, where I “Plants of the Gods,” with Albert Hof- lived the whole ceremony as my higher mann, the Swiss scientist who discov- self. Anything I thought came to be.” ered LSD). In 1976, a graduate student Bergen allows that, of the nine ceremo- of Schultes’s brought a collection of the nies he’s attended, eight have been “un- plants back from his field research to a pleasant experiences.” But he intends to greenhouse at the University of Hawaii— continue using ayahuasca for the rest of where Dennis McKenna happened to his life. He believes that it will heal not be pursuing a master’s degree. Thanks only him but civilization at large. to McKenna, some B. caapi cuttings “es- The process of making ayahuasca is caped captivity,” he told me. “I took beyond artisanal: it is nearly Druidical. them over to the Big Island, where my “We pick the chacruna leaf at sunrise brother and his wife had purchased some in this very specific way: you say a prayer THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 12, 2016 31 and just pick the lower ones from each ing early trip that he described as “the “In Silicon Valley, where everyone suffers tree,” a lithe ayahuasquera in her early most painful experience I’ve ever had from neo-mania,” Ferriss continued, forties—British accent, long blond hair, by a factor of a thousand. I felt like I “having interactions with songs and rit- a background in Reiki—told me about was being torn apart and killed a thou- uals that have remained, in some cases, her harvests, in Hawaii. “You clean the sand times a second for two hours.” unchanged for hundreds or thousands vine with wooden spoons, meticulously, This was followed by hours of grand- of years is very appealing.” all the mulch away from the roots— mal seizures; Ferriss had rug burns Ayahuasca isn’t the only time- honored they look so beautiful, like a human on his face the next day.
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