Psychedelic Wisdom with Dennis McKenna

“Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what’s in there.” - Dennis McKenna

Celebrity ethnobotanist and ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna and his late brother, Terence, began their lifelong curiosity-driven quest for exotic hallucinogens in Amazonian jungles in 1971. Terence, a leading authority on shamanism who was known as the “Timothy Leary of the ‘90s,” chronicled the so-called “experiment at La Chorrera" in his book True Hallucinations (Harper San Francisco, 1993), and Dennis tells the full story in his newly published memoir, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (North Star Press 2012).

Zoe Helene interviewed Dennis during a visit to the "Glass Flowers" exhibit at Harvard Natural History Museum.

You first saw these glass flowers (lifelike botanical models made entirely of glass) in 1974?
I saw them in ‘74 when I first made a pilgrimage to visit R.E. Schultes at Harvard, so the glass flowers became emblematic of my visit to Schultes. I made a point to go see them on every subsequent visit.
Schultes looms large in your book. Why is he so important?
R. E. Schultes is a god, in fact. Andrew Weil and Wade Davis were two of his notable students. He’s sometimes called the Father of Ethnobotany, and he was the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum for many years. Schultes was known mainly as the world’s expert on hallucinogenic plants, but he was also known for his expertise on rubber and orchids. He spent thirteen or fourteen years continuously in the Amazon.
In his field research, didn’t he conduct bio-assays—trying plant remedies on himself?
Oh yes, he tried them. But he was very quiet when he was at Harvard—very straight-laced. He studied ayahuasca from his earliest days in the Amazon, in the ‘30s and ‘40s and he claimed that he tried all these things, but all he’d ever say was that he “saw colors.”
Tell me about your own research with ayahuasca?
I went through a lot of different phases with my scientific and professional ambitions to make ayahuasca an object of study. The chemistry, pharmacology and ethnobotany of ayahuasca was the focus of my doctoral research and ever since has never been far from my scientific interests. For a long time I wrote proposals and lobbied to do an IND (Investigational New Drug Application), which you have to do if you want to do an FDA-approved protocol to conduct clinical investigations of a new medicine.
Unfortunately, the FDA makes it ten times harder to study botanical drugs than to study pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is quality control because you have to be able to quantify the doses and all that. Ayahuasca is doubly difficult because not only is it a botanical preparation, but it contains DMT, a Schedule I controlled substance...
continue reading on Reality Sandwich