Dr. Dennis McKenna has conducted research in ethnopharmacology for over 30 years. He currently teaches in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.

credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theevilofbeth/953036153/

Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself

Dennis McKenna: I’m 60 years old, born in Paonia Colorado, a small town in Western Colorado in 1950. I experienced my teenage years in the turbulent 60′s, but had a fairly normal life in my early years. I shared many interests with my brother Terence, and while growing up we were both ‘nerds’ (though the word hadn’t been invented yet), meaning that we were more interested in science and science fiction than athletics or other ‘normal’ teenage interests. We were butterfly and amateur rock collectors; amateur rocketeers, and that kind of thing. My dad encouraged and supported this kind of thing. So that was an early influence; curiosity about the world which our parents encouraged. Then the 60′s came along and we were well-primed for it. Largely due to our early exposure to science fiction and my father’s occasional purchases of Fate magazine, we were open to the idea of paranormal experiences, UFOs, the occult, other dimensions, altered states, aliens, and all of that. So when psychedelics came along, naturally we were fascinated by them, though we knew little about them at the time. And in the early to mid-60′s they didn’t have the social stigma attached to them that they acquired later.

So to us the idea that psychedelics could actually give access to real experiences of other dimensions, alien entities, etc. which we had only read about up to that point, meant we were naturally drawn to them. And as we learned more about them, during the ferment of the late 60′s, they seemed to Terence and me to be far more interesting than anything else going on at the time; the political ferment of the Vietnam war and the protest movement; the hippy, countercultural ‘revolution’ which we were involved in but also aloof from in some respects. The hippies were largely anti-intellectual, and we thought of ourselves as intellectuals. Hippies were involved in psychedelics but really didn’t have any kind of intellectual framework for them; they were ‘recreational’ and fun. We took them more seriously than most people, or so we liked to think. Then along came DMT…DMT was rarely encountered in the late 60′s but Terence had access to it as a result of his contacts in Berkeley, where he was living at the time. You could occasionally find badly synthesized DMT in those circles at the time. And to us, DMT seemed like a whole different order of experience; much more profound than LSD, mescaline, any of the others around at the time. Psilocybin was unheard of, never encountered, and any mushrooms one ran into in those days were LSD sprayed onto store-bought, edible mushrooms. So when we discovered DMT we were blown away. It was not only the most interesting drug we’d ever encountered, it was the most interesting thing we’d ever encountered. (interesting in the sense of fascinating, peculiar, mysterious, frightening, astonishing…). Nearly 50 years later, I’d have to say it still is! One of the top two or three anyway.

So it was really DMT that got us onto this path. To us, nothing else was so interesting as DMT and the cosmic dimensions that it seemed to rip open to exploration. For a couple of dyed-in-the-wool science fiction nuts, DMT seemed like the ultimate mystery! So it was our fascination with DMT that led us into the study of Jungian psychology, shamanism, ethnobotany, anthropology, magic, alchemy, mysticism, and all of those related topics. Each in our own way, we determined that nothing else mattered so much as the single-minded pursuit of this mystery. And in many respects it was this early interest and curiosity about DMT and other tryptamines that have guided many of the personal and professional choices I have made since that time. The decision to study ethnobotany, plant chemistry and pharmacology; the fascination with South America and travels there over many years; and the contributions I have made to science, whether directly related to psychedelics or not, have largely been the result of that early interest and passion.

Avi: Give us a synopsis of you and your brother’s adventures in La Chorrera

Dennis: The short answer is that we had scoured the ethnobotanical literature and had learned of an orally-active form of DMT that the Witoto Indians of South America prepared from the sap of Virola species (a genus of trees in the nutmeg family). We were frustrated by the fact that the DMT experience, when smoking synthetic DMT, was overwhelming, quite intense, but very short (about 10-15 minutes). It was hard to spend enough time in that ‘place’ to really get a handle on what was going on. So when we stumbled across a paper by Schultes about this orally active form of DMT, we thought that maybe, in that form, the experience would last longer and we could understand it better. No one knew about ayahuasca and the fact that it is an orally activated form of DMT at that time; this was 1970, before the chemistry and pharmacology of ayahuasca had been thoroughly understood.

So we decided to travel to La Chorrera, Colombia, in search of the mysterious Witoto hallucinogen, known as ‘ookoohey’, thinking that this was the Holy Grail we were seeking. But when we actually got to La Chorrera, in February of 1971, actually getting our hands on oo-koo-hey proved to be problematic, due to cultural restrictions among other things. Years later when we actually did find ookoohey it proved to be fairly disappointing. But at LC we decided to settle in for a while and bide our time, and hope that an opportunity to encounter ookoohey would present itself. Meantime, the pastures around the little mission village of La Chorrera had a large herd of Sabu cattle grazing there; and the dung of these cows happens to be the preferred substrate for a particularly potent form of psilocybin mushrooms, Psilocybe cubensis. So there were big, beautiful clusters of Psilocybe cubensis growing out of every cow pie in the pasture! So at first we didn’t take them seriously. We knew what they were, from our literature searches, but we thought they were just fun; we didn’t realize that it was the mushrooms, not ookoohey, that are the perfect orally active form of DMT (for all practical purposes; DMT and psilocybin/psilocin are close chemical cousins). And so we just started taking them recreationally, as much as a way to pass the time while we waited for the ‘real’ mystery to emerge. It didn’t take long for the ‘real mystery’ to manifest itself, after a few high-dose mushroom sessions. In those sessions it quickly became clear that the mushrooms were the source of the real gnosis, and our quest for ookoohey became all but forgotten, as the mushrooms began to download a lot of what seemed like gnosis to us. In particular some extremely peculiar, ‘funny ideas’ as my brother put it, about biophysics, insect metamorphosis, the nature of time, and suggestions about an ‘experiment’ we could perform that would not only change us, but might be the key to opening up another dimension. So we performed this ‘experiment’, really more of a ritual than an experiment (in the scientific sense), and it had spectacular results; but not the result we had predicted. Not the collapse of the space-time continuum, but a profound and prolonged psychological transformation, which must have looked like psychosis to the casual observer, but to us (Terence & me) made perfect sense in the context of what was happening to us. Years later when I think about what happened it seems to me that it fits the model of shamanic initiation more than it does a prolonged simultaneous psychosis. All the themes were there; the notion of a cosmic journey, of transformation into something not human or more than human; and the acquisition of shamanic powers, such as telepathy, the ability to heal, knowledge of plants, access to vast archives of archetypal information.

So all of these themes have been explored to some extent in my brother’s book, True Hallucinations. Much of the rest of both of our lives since that event have been, in one way or another, an effort to come to terms with what happened, and make sense of it. It certainly has been a major influence on the directions our lives took following that event; and 40 years later, I still wouldn’t say that we have figured it out.

source = BoingBoing