An Interview with Dennis McKenna (Whole Interview)

A few months ago I had the honor of interviewing a legend in the world of plant medicine, and a personal hero of mine – Dennis McKenna.

When I first got started on the healing path, the last name “McKenna” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. You see, Dennis and his late brother Terrence were pushing their existential limits with mysterious plant medicines in the Amazon Jungle decades before most of knew what the word shamanism meant.

These two extraordinary brothers, a poet and a scientist, created quite a stir in the intellectual community with their powerful accounts from the outer limits of human civilization as well as human consciousness itself.

The question “can plants talk?” might seem like something only a child would ask, but in our interview below, Dennis shows us how plants actually communicate very “fluidly” with the world around them. Possibly using even more advanced language than we humans do…

If you’re interested in shamanism, herbalism, environmentalism, or all 3 of these isms (like me!) – you don’t want to miss our talk with Dennis below.

The wisdom he shares will change the way you interact with your food, medicine, and backyard

(WE’VE ALSO INCLUDED THE WRITTEN TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW BELOW THE VIDEO!)

Nick Polizzi: Hi this is Nick from The Sacred Science, and I’m really excited about today’s talk with Dennis McKenna. Many of you already know Dennis from the pioneering work he did in the amazon with his brother Terence McKenna back in the 1970s. This is detailed in his recent book “The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.” He is a leading ethno pharmacologist and an authority on plant chemistry. It’s an honor to be with you today. How are you Dennis?

Dennis McKenna: I am very well Nick, it’s a real pleasure to be here, thank you and Mileen so much for inviting me. I’ve been looking forward to this.

NP: It’s amazing, for the last 10 years it’s been kind of a dream of mine to have a one on one conversation with you. A lot of the work you’ve done has inspired us to create the Sacred Science. So I’m really honored and just grateful for everything you’ve contributed to the world of plant medicine and spirituality and bringing science into the picture in a way that really compliments all the work that we’re doing in the jungle and with native cultures around the world. 

I think where I’d like to start, is that a lot of people know your work who are listening right now, but a lot of people may need a little bit of background. Dennis please explain what ethno-pharmacology is and what is your involvement in it, what you do with it?

DM: Well that’s easy. There is a kind of tortured, meaning long, definition of ethno pharmacology but it kind of makes sense as you unpack it. What is ethno pharmacology? Well it’s the study of medicinal plants used in indigenous cultures.

But not really. It’s more than that. The formal definition, which I didn’t come up with but I like – it’s the interdisciplinary scientific investigation of biological active substances used or observed by humans in traditional cultures. It’s a many part definition but they’re all important in the sense that it’s not just confined to plants.

Fungi, animals, all kinds of things in nature contain biologically active substances that are useful. It’s not complying with things we might ingest like psychoactives or something else, because something like arrow poisons for example would be a legitimate subject for ethno pharmacology.

There is good evidence that often humans take their cues from watching animals, so it’s not confined to things humans would ingest. It’s not confined to plants. It’s used and may be observed by humans. Also the traditional cultures part is kind of important because it puts a fence around it. In other words we’re looking at traditional or indigenous use.

Otherwise what we do know and call pharmacology and bio medicine – that’s ethno pharmacology too because we’re all monkeys. We’re all humans doing this human activity but we don’t usually think of Pfizer and those people doing ethno pharmacology. But they are, in a really broad way, so that is the reason for such a tortured definition.

NP: So there are major pharmaceutical companies that are using the same practices that have people down in the jungles of the world trying to find plants that are promising for their particular products?

DM: You wish that was true on some level, but it’s not really that true. It’s puzzling to me as a person interested in drug discovery and bridging the gap between traditional practices and modern pharmaceutical technology, that if the drug companies have people scouring the jungle looking for new medicines they don’t really talk about it.  In fact if they are doing it, they are doing it primarily for PR purposes. They are not really serious about it.

Why is that?

A few things have contributed to that over time. One is this whole intellectual property thing. Pharmaceutical companies or corporations have that perspective. Their objective is to be profitable finding new medicines for healing people and all that. Those are distinctly secondary objectives even though they’ll tell you it’s the most important thing.

No, the most important thing is making money, and they don’t want to share that. They want to own the genetic resources, they want some of the things they might isolate from natural sources and turn it into drugs. They don’t want to share that with anybody, certainly not with a bunch of savages, a bunch of indigenous people. Why should we share that, right?

So there used to be bio piracy and indigenous intellectual property was not really acknowledged as an issue so they could just come to these cultures and say “Tell us all your secrets, thank you very much! We’ll take that knowledge! You may get a check in the mail twenty years down the line.” But they have seen no ethical issues with appropriating the knowledge.

Now that’s changed because you live in a global world where indigenous people are not stupid and they understand that this knowledge is valuable now. But there’s a new level of sophistication because they can hire their own lawyers and indigenous groups have some blocks in the way of the pharmaceutical industry toward making these discoveries.

It’s been a disincentive, which is an unfortunate thing because everybody loses. Drug companies say “Thank you very much, we won’t proceed with this” and a potentially life-saving medicine is not discovered and people are not benefited, so you really need to look for framework that works for everybody in that respect.

Then I think the other factor that contributed to all this is about at the end of the eighties, the pharmaceutical industry were developing all of these sort of synthetic in-house methods to discover new compounds. All this fancy chemistry, combinatorial chemistry and this sort of thing. The perception was that they don’t need nature, that new drugs are not going to come from nature. They’re going to come out of vats in Laboratories made by synthetic chemists.

This was a huge miscalculation because nature’s always been given us the leads for drug discovery and the hubris that they had, it was like we do not need nature anymore. We can think these things up.

Well plants are way better chemists than chemists when it comes to making new structures. These synthetic compounds come through these mass screening approaches and mass synthesis approaches where in a single pot you could take a structural template and make every derivative possible under the reaction conditions, and then you would just clip them through these different receptor screens.

They thought, “Wow this is great!” But it didn’t work.

The crisis right now in the pharmaceutical industry is that the drug discovery pipeline is empty or getting empty. I’m talking about new discoveries that make it from the field to the clinic. New compounds like that are not being discovered. Every year, there are fewer and fewer of them, and they’re wondering “What are we doing wrong?”

Well what you’re doing wrong is that you abandoned nature back in the day. It’s true that discovering drugs from natural sources, apart from all the intellectual property issues, is tough – just the sheer challenge of isolating things out of natural sources and purifying them. It’s much easier to synthesize things.

If the drugs don’t have the activity, then it’s not so good. So now we’ve gone through about a twenty year cycle where the drug companies are again waking up to the fact that this was a mistake and now they’re trying to reintegrate nature. There’s a lot more attention and interest.

I don’t think they send people out in teams to comb the jungle. In fact, they can’t do that because of the ownership issues. The smart ones are working with people that are already immersed in that environment. You get the information by talking to people, traditional healers, who know how to use the plants.

It’s complex but it’s not like Pfizer or Merck or all these huge companies have teams of people combing the jungle, and in some ways, that’s unfortunate because there are trillions of dollars’ worth of undiscovered drugs just waiting to be discovered in regions of high biodiversity.

If there was a concerted effort to do that it would reflect the true value of the rainforest, which is tremendous. But since it’s not being done, capitalism tends to look at dollars and cents so there’s an incentive to undervalue the rain forest and that’s unfortunate. If the environment could be changed so there’s more reciprocity I don’t know how you would approach it.

Ideally, drug companies would gather together to cooperate to create a Consortium and set aside x billion dollars and say “we’ll set aside these environments, we’ll protect these environments for the right to bio prospect and go through it. But we’ll make sure indigenous people are in good shape, the environment is in good shape, their health care is taken care of.” But that takes cooperation on a global level and it’s just not a model that works for capitalist predatory companies. The UN could be a framework for this to happen. Right now, it’s just not happening.

NP: I love this idea.  At the root is that plants are the best chemists, that plants are better chemists then chemists. Plants are natural chemists and that goes into the heart of what I was excited to talk to you about today.  I’ve heard in a few of your recent talks you mention the concept that for us humans, we have language, we communicate through words, whereas plants communicate through their chemistry, which is pretty fundamental in this idea of them being better chemists than chemists. They speak in chemistry so they are constantly adapting and learning new ways to communicate.

I would love it if you could put that into some kind of framework. This idea of how plants communicate that way and how through that communication they’ve sort of learned how to communicate with us and create environments that are conducive to us, a species that could potentially be a benefit to them if we don’t ignore them and do the wrong thing.

DM: Right. If you look at the chemical biodiversity in the plant kingdom, you find it’s divided into so-called primary metabolites or secondary metabolites. The primary metabolites are pretty much universal, the molecules of life. Then you have the secondary metabolites which are obviously not essential for life because they are not found in everything, but they are found in specific species.

So what purpose do they serve? These are the secondary so called “messenger molecules” and they mediate the plants’ relationships with everything in their environment from fungi to insects, mammals, humans, anything that might interact with them, on all levels of organization.

Nature is very creative. It’s not really a big metabolic or energy cost for plants to make these things because they have photosynthesis. Energy to synthesize compounds is not really a limiting factor. Still, if one compound works for one purpose and it will work for another, then nature is ingenious about re-purposing molecules for multiple reasons.

For example, Beta carbolines are the alkaloids that are found in Ayahuasca. They are the monoamine oxidase inhibitors in Ayahuasca that activate or protect the DMT from being broken down, so they have that effect in mammals. They inhibit monoamine oxidase but they also are photodynamic so they have antibiotic activity and anti-parasitic activities in the presence of light. They are light activated, some of them.

They do other things too. If you put your panel of beta carbolines through a screen you will find antibiotic, anti-parasitic, and anti-fungal activity. They have a whole spectrum of activities, so plants are ingenious to use these messenger molecules in a variety of contexts.

People don’t understand that it’s easy to look at a plant and say “well it’s just kind of sitting there, it’s not doing much” but it’s deceptive because there is a lot going on, even though it’s just sitting there and you don’t see it. It’s photosynthesizing and it’s making these compounds. It’s like being in a multiple chat session with everything around it. It’s talking to the fungi, insects, animals, and other plants.

These secondary compounds are kind of eco-systematic neurotransmitters in the sense that in the brain, neurotransmitters are those small molecules that mediate signal transduction, which is a huge thing in biology. As much as the neurotransmitters, ultimately derived from plants, work to link neural networks to talk to each other, they also tie the ecosystem together in very much the same way. It’s all about homeostasis, feedback loops and signal transduction.

NP: Is it a coincidence (obviously not) that these neurotransmitters that plants synthesize match so closely to the ones in our brains? What’s the explanation for that – what came first?

Obviously plants came first, but why is there such a similarity? What is that achieving in this ecosystem?

DM: It’s just a reflection of evolutionary consequences. Serotonin for example, is one of the oldest neurotransmitters phylogenetically, and one of the oldest neuro-hormones in our phylogeny and in mammalian phylogeny.  But it’s much more ancient than that.

There are people who looked at the phylogeny of the genes that make tryptophan which is an essential amino acid. We don’t make it but it’s universal in everything. The genetic so called “trp operon,” the cluster of genes that synthesizes that amino acid which is the precursor for all the indole alkaloids – that goes back 3.8 billion years at least.

Those genes are found in the archaebacteria, which are the most ancient organisms that we know. So when it comes to mammals, a relatively recent player on the evolutionary stage, the neurotransmitters already had these messenger functions in the ecosystem. Then when nervous systems began to evolve there was just a convenient molecule that was very effective in the signal transduction process, and so, it was just adopted.

Ultimately at some point we trace our ancestry to the LUCA, the likely universal common ancestor. We all evolved from that critter. It was probably not very interesting but it gave rise to everything else, so you’ve got this proliferation genetically in species and so on. The molecules were carried along and what was useful was adapted to numerous purposes so I think that’s the answer. It wasn’t a coincidence so much as an inevitability. Why should life keep reinventing the wheel? If you got something that works you fit it together like Lego pieces and I think that’s the reason.

NP: I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but this concept of not our inferiority, but the equal playing field that humans and plants are on, is kind of a new thing. Even doing the shamanic work and plant medicine work, I’ve never fully grasped it until recently, reading some of your work and listening to some of your talks. It’s the idea that it’s possible we don’t know what we think we know.

I believe that in many aspects of my life but I always thought I had the plant world kind of figured out. I kind of understood the role it played in my life. The work that you’re doing points to this idea (and correct me if I’m wrong here), that they are the ones that are actually in charge. And we’re not necessarily doing their bidding, but we are not the apex. 

DM: We are not the apex. we are not running the show. You’ve heard me say this in talks but it doesn’t hurt to reiterate. People say what do you learn from ayahuasca?

One thing I learn, one thing it really emphasizes, it reminds me how little we do know. It’s very humbling in that way. We are post technological. We tend to think we know a great deal. Actually we know only a very small slice of what’s really going on.

Science is very good at looking at isolated phenomena and small pieces of reality and it’s good for detailed work – you dissect some process and you can really understand it in depth. The question is how does it fit into the entire holistic environment that life exists in. It’s not very good at creating this holistic picture. That’s one aspect of it. I think science tends to be a little arrogant to know how much it knows – there is no place for that because what we don’t know will always greatly exceed what we do know.   And occasionally people will write a book about science and say

“You know the general gist of this is that we have it figured out, right? We understand the main underpinning of reality and the rest of it is just mopping up and clearing up the detail and so on.”

I always tend to laugh because that is so short sided and usually a book like that will come out, and then next month a discovery will be made that completely overturns our understanding of some process.

“Well I guess maybe not, maybe we don’t know so much” – and I think it’s good to remember that we really don’t know so much.

The other thing is we’ve been poisoned by this Judeo Christian perspective that has poisoned the collective mind – this idea that we are separate from nature and we own nature and we dominate nature – none of that is true.

Lucky for us it’s not true, because look at what a mess we make of our own societies.   My God we’re busy undermining the stability of nature but imagine if we were actually in charge of it. So there’s that aspect as well.

You may know the author Michael Pollan and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” He describes this beautifully – we think we are domesticating plants and but it’s funny how we are carrying out the plants’ agenda – so who is working for who here?

But I don’t really have a problem with that, because if you look at the biosphere as a whole, clearly plants are the essential thing that’s keeping the whole shooting match going. Through photosynthesis it’s bringing energy in from the cosmos and binding it into chemical energy and it runs this super organism. The biosphere is a super organism and it’s being discussed in that way – the whole concept of Gaia and so on -and people dismiss that and say it’s just hippie new age nonsense. Actually it’s not.

The Gaia concept was not developed by hippies. It was developed largely by James Lovelock, who is a geophysicist and a fairly hard scientist, and for a while it fell out of favor. I think people are beginning to look at that in a different way and say “yeah basically that is it” – that life is maintaining conditions on earth that are amenable to life and if those processes weren’t going on, some of these key factors, like the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and so on, would quickly go off track.

So life is keeping the earth hospitable to life. So who’s running things? Not us. In fact, we seem to be the piece of grit in this smooth running machinery of the living thing that is destabilizing a lot of these processes now. Not only are we not running things, I think we are sort of the species of concern to the community of life. And it’s like “What are we going to do with these crazy primates who can’t seem to restrain themselves?”

NP: So there’s that concept of the Judeo Christian perspective on nature and how it needs to be contained and controlled, feared even – look at all the old fairy tales looking at it as this enemy – like nature is this enemy and synonymous with the devil itself sometimes – when you look at certain interpretations.

There’s this idea that we became the first agrarian civilizations after we came out of the trees and stopped hunting and gathering. As soon as we started doing that, as soon as we took a step from that more free, living in harmony with the earth lifestyle, thousands of years ago, the idea that all of a sudden on these cow patties, these little species of delicious looking mushrooms sprout up, is really intriguing to me. I’m sure you’ll have a much more well thought out perspective on this. But for me it looks and feels like we took one big step away from probably something that was a living right with nature towards an agrarian kind of lifestyle. And the first thing that happens is nature gives us this SOS warning to kind of keep her in mind as we are plowing our fields and starting to raise livestock. It’s like now there is going to be this portal that is right in the middle of what’s most important that I’m going to send your way. 

Can you speak a little about that? I know that the psilocybin mushroom shows up a lot in your work and I would love to just hear your thoughts on why you think that showed up when it did and what you think the significance of that was?

DM: Well I think it was always there. These mushrooms were always there. Phylo-genetically, mushrooms are old compared to us. Psilocybin mushrooms were around but they were probably in nature and not really noticed. I don’t know if you know the author Stephen Harrod Buhner?

NP: Of course.

DP: He writes beautiful work and he writes about how psilocybin and fungi in these pastoral ecosystems actually have a lot to do with regulating the way the ecosystem works. This goes back to the whole idea that these things are neurotransmitters on the eco-systemic level, so it’s not like they didn’t have a function.

But again, when we came along and began to actually impose our agrarian footprint on those things, we were disturbing the landscape. And what’s interesting about the psilocybin species, they’re an invasive species – they love nothing more than to colonize degraded areas where you cut things down and you’ve got rotting material. So these impacted landscapes will suddenly show up. Unwittingly, we’ve created these habitats that are perfect for mushrooms and suddenly they seem to be everywhere – nobody noticed before.

A good example of this is Vancouver. As you know British Columbia is home to about 30 species of psilocybin mushrooms that are native to that area – most you would never notice – they’re in the forest and difficult to find. But they happen to like to growing on bark mulch, so an institution like UBC buys bark mulch by the tons to landscape their garden. And all of a sudden you have all these species of mushroom showing up in these areas in great abundance and people began to notice these things.

I mean you can’t not notice these things. Maybe it’s coincidental or maybe it’s an accident or maybe there is more going on here than we know but certainly it seems like the more we disturb the landscape, the more sort of visible these things become and sort of tempt us, saying, “Here I am and I look pretty good, give me a nibble.” So who knows. But that does seem to be going on.

I had a friend, when I lived in Vancouver, a mycologist fellow, and his hobby was to go around and grow mycelium out on bark mulch with some of these outdoor growing species. And on a given weekend go he’d go to parks and just seed them and just make sure they were there – being a very good citizen – a good thing to do, even though the mushrooms really didn’t need his help. But he was feeling like he was contributing something. He had this whole symbiotic relationship going on with these different mushrooms. It was interesting to go to his house because he had most of these species at some stage of fruiting in his backyard so it was like fairy land or something.

NP: It feels like the matriarchal way of living ended right around the rise of the Judeo Christian religion boom in the world and I’m just wondering. Do you think this idea of sacred plants is at odds with this patriarchal world that we now see? Is it sort of the answer or calling us back to something like that? I know it’s getting a little more woo woo than what we normally talk about but I want to know what are your beliefs are on that.

Is this supposed to be something that is a correction that is not only in our psyche but also in the way that we are arranging our civilization and who’s in charge, gender-wise as we move forward?

DM: It’s not accidental that with the rise of the patriarchal religions and the whole Judeo Christian perspective and Salvationist religions – it’s not that these more matriarchal and ecstasy-based pagan-based religions just faded away – no they were actively suppressed and every effort was made to stamp that out.

That was the beginning of the war on drugs and the war on anything based in biology. What you get with Judeo Christianity is basically a denial of biology and the denial of the intrinsic value of nature – a denial of the pleasures of corporality, in a certain sense that anything is important. “Our reward is in heaven, our reward is in the afterlife” – that’s what we’re told and nothing else matters. And I think that that has really poisoned civilization and it’s led us to the place that we are now.

And yes these messenger molecules like ayahuasca, psilocybin and even cannabis to a certain extent – indigenous people call these plant teachers. I think this is a very apt way to characterize them and the plant teachers are getting a little hysterical in their efforts to get the message out. This is why you see this happening. It’s going global because on some planetary level I think the Gaia senses there is danger to the whole show – the stability of the whole planetary system.

And for whatever reason, these neurotransmitter-containing plants and fungi have been sort of delegated to try to wake up the monkeys – talk to the monkeys.  Make us realize and make us wake up again to our relationship to nature. It’s a wakeup call to how estranged we have become from nature.

I believe our main challenge in the 21 century is that we have to effect a global shift in consciousness, a global shift in our understanding with our relationship with nature. Number one, we are not running things and we need to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. We need to listen to these plant teachers and make changes on a global scale. But the first change is that we have to wake up, we have to acknowledge that we’ve gotten seriously off track. There are solutions but until we acknowledge that and until we do wake up then it’s hopeless. Basically we have to change this perspective.  Then we can begin to make changes. It has to happen on a global scale and it has to happen quickly.

That’s the worrisome part. You look at ayahuasca for example – it’s suddenly emerged on the global stage – I think it’s a measure of sort of the urgency of the message that they’re trying to get out.

NP: I think it’s interesting what you mentioned about Judeo Christianity being centered on the afterlife – you wait until the afterlife to reap the benefits of how you lived your life now. And then you have something like psilocybin, and people like Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, helping people suffering from what we like to call “end of life” issues. That’s kind of a cute way of saying people who are scared shitless of what’s going to happen next after not really asking themselves lots of questions about what it all means. These plants are now being used to help people make a more peaceful transition, which is kind of a peak at what’s possible, and a peak at what’s missing from our civilization right now – being able pull the veil back and see the mystery while you’re still alive and understand how important it is for you to ask questions right now, and not for something that’s going to happen later. We need to focus on what’s happening right now, beneath the surface.

DM: Yes I think that things like psilocybin give people a chance to have a meaningful experience while you’re still alive. I don’t know if there is an afterlife or not, maybe there is or maybe there isn’t. But I think to put all your hopes on this is kind of a con game, you know?

You’re supposed to have faith and I don’t have much use for faith personally. Because having faith is like being asked to believe something even though there is no evidence for it – you just have faith.

Well I’m a scientist. I like evidence and I think things should be questioned. So I think the use of something like psilocybin to have these meaningful (call them mystical if you want) experiences is very useful, because they remind people again of all these things that were talking about – the limitations of our knowledge and that fact that the world is far more mysterious and beautiful and amazing and sacred actually then we ever imagined.

And these are things that we need to experience in this life, and hopefully not on our deathbed. If that’s the only option then experience it on your deathbed, but the sooner one can come to that realization, the better because you have a chance to share that with other people. I think it changes the way you relate to your loved ones. It changes the way that you relate to nature and your existence.

As a species, we’re very prone to look at the future and not value the moment. What’s coming out of some of this psilocybin research is important. People in terminal states like cancer and so on – they have these experiences and you would expect that their response is “well now I’m not so afraid of death.” And that is a part of it.

But mostly the insight that they come away with is something like “I was terrified of dying, I know I’m dying – but, I’m alive now – I’m alive now and now is the time to focus on the fact that I’m alive and okay I’m dying but aren’t we all?”

Sooner or later nobody gets out of this alive the important thing is to value your life in the moment. That doesn’t mean you can’t make plans but just appreciate your life in the moment and the people that you love and just simple things that we experience. I do not understand why, (I do and I don’t understand,) but it seems like organized religion is so concerned to make sure that nobody ever has a meaningful personal experience. That is like krypton to Judeo Christians. It’s like it’s not for you – were just ordinary schmucks – were not priests, we somehow don’t qualify for that – and they do everything they can to hollow out the religion that carries absolutely no spiritual punch at all, that I can tell. It’s long been turned into essentially a political organization. It’s more concerned with controlling people’s behavior than bringing them close to any mystery. So what good is it?

It’s comfort for some people, but it’s a false comfort, in a certain way. And it’s unfortunate because people could be having genuinely meaningful experiences – more realistic ways of relating to their existence as human being, their relationship to other people, to the planet. But because this Judeo Christian perspective is so pervasive and now completely saturates our society and our political system and everything else, you can’t have an honest conversation. If you say anything anti-religion then you’re stigmatized and shouted down. So we have to listen to clowns. Just take a look at the election.

NP: It’s between fear and ultimate pleasure – it’s totally polarized.  Here’s the terrible things that can happen to you and here are all these amazing things that you can get if you just behave yourself. It treats the population like children and I feel like we’ve just deteriorated into children, or a childish consciousness.

DM: This is what the powers that be would like because children, if they’re good little children, they do what they’re told right? So we’re the trouble makers, we’re the ones who are saying “but mom, what about this and what about that – oh shut up Johnny, don’t ask too many embarrassing questions.”

I feel as inquiring minds it’s our job to ask questions and it’s our job to think for ourselves and that’s something that psychedelics encourage us to do. It’s kind of the ultimate act in some way of independent thinking because when you take a psychedelic [and you can read up on it or you can be informed about it or you can read other people’s experiences and that’s all good, it’s part of educating yourself] but when the rubber meets the road it’s the encounter between you and the teacher. And that is not something you can have somebody else do for you. That’s something you have to do and so it’s very liberating in that sense. It’s a validation of that person and your own ability to take this information in and make of it what you will.

This is not encouraged by religion.

NP: Personal question – how do you shut off your science brain? Ceremonies are different for everybody, but for me, my enemy in the intense ceremony, whether it’s ayahuasca or a sweat lodge, is my own talk, my own analysis and thought of what’s going on in front of me. Most of the time it makes things a lot harder

How do you, as a scientist, turn that off and allow for that kind of blank state or the direct experience of what’s going on around you in a ceremonial setting? 

Or do you not? Have you made peace with that?

DM: I don’t know that I do. I’m often not very successful at that. I think a lot of us have that, because again we are so burdened with this idea point of view. Separation from what you’re observing is so baked into us that it’s very hard to get away from it.

I don’t think indigenous people and children have this problem. For one thing, literacy as wonderful as it is, gets in the way of direct perception in some ways. We’re so bound into that idea that it’s very hard to step outside it. Psychedelics let you do that temporarily, but even in those situations you can’t entirely let go of it. I think it’s a matter of dose partly.

That’s why with the heroic dose, there is something to be said about that. You’re just so completely gone that these artificial structures of perception go away. That could be a pretty unsettling place to be. I don’t take heroic does every time I take ayahuasca – I’m not brave enough to do that frankly – but when it happens, it’s a great gift. Then you have a trip where you say “yes, this is what I was hoping for, this is what I came for.”

That happens [not] reliably every time.

NP: I want to close with one question – it’s connected to a lot of what we’ve been discussing but it’s something that you said in a talk – you gave this as a little side comment that you couldn’t go into it because it would just take too long to talk about. I just wanted to just ask you a question that would help you get into that place again because I was very curious about this. 

You said “women are probably responsible for most of the discoveries that have advanced evolution, and there is a good reason for that.”  Can you kind of unpack that a little bit and delve into it?

DM: Women are responsible for most of the discoveries that have advanced evolution? Well, I don’t think there’s a particular mystery about that. For one thing it’s pretty clear that agriculture was probably invented by women. Men were out doing hunter-gatherer stuff, doing the macho things, killing the buffalo or whatever, the tigers and bringing them in.

Women were there looking after the kids, making the food, right? Making the garbage pile in which they are throwing away the seeds after they clean the food. And they are in the position to notice the plants that we eat are growing up out of the garbage pile. It’s a pretty elementary observation but then the light bulb comes on and says, “We don’t have to forage in the forest for these things. We can just clear a spot and just grow these things.”

Agriculture was probably the most significant thing that happened to us as a species, and women did that. Women, I think because of the connection to children and just their inherent nature, they are closer to biology than men are – and this miracle of fecundity and reproduction and all that. To them it’s an everyday reality.

We men have to alter our consciousness to get close to that. Women are kind of in that space all the time in a certain intuitive way so I think that women had a great deal to contribute in terms of if agriculture was sort of the pivot point that let us turn from a hunter gatherer existence, which is not necessarily a bad way to live, into a sedentary kind of existence that then made things like civilization and technology and art and music, science and politics and patriarchy. These things are many edged swords.

I think this really originated with women. Eve is the progenitor of our species – whatever that concept.  I don’t think that’s a profound statement I just think it’s just an intuition. Take ayahuasca for example – people experience ayahuasca as a feminine entity, often. But then of course there’s always the outlier who doesn’t experience it that way.  And there’s a temptation to sort of fall into these pre-concepts, some of which are heavily influenced by new age thinking, and that’s basically okay.

But that’s what it comes down to. That’s why it’s important to have this personal encounter and there are tribes that use ayahuasca and view it as a masculine thing. And in some cases it doesn’t have a sexuality – it doesn’t have that kind of personality. Mushrooms for example, in a lot of indigenous culture and in my own experiences, are neither masculine nor feminine. They are more like children actually – more like asexual. Many cultures, those that use them, liken them to children.

NP: It’s yet another one of those things that I feel we weren’t educated on growing up or just miseducated on growing up. I don’t think we ever hear that statement that women were responsible for most of the practices that led to our evolution. It just doesn’t seem like that’s part of the narrative and I find it very interesting.

DM: The cultural narrative is a patriarchal narrative. The victors get to write history and the women’s contributions have always been suppressed, because of the male fear. In some ways, if we acknowledge that, it will somehow diminish us, diminish our sex, [diminish the idea] that we men are the ones that are making all the difference in the world.

But that goes back to the whole illusion that we are running things. We are NOT running things. But it’s more convenient for us on a political and social level if we get people to buy into the idea that man are in control. Look at the mess that’s gotten us into. I say let the women have it. They can’t do a worse job then we’ve done. Women are too smart to say “why we would want it?”

NP: Well if we’re not in charge and yet we think we are and there’s all this terrible stuff happening in the world – this cloud of doom and gloom that we’re all feeling, whether it’s directly or subtly – it kind of brings some hope that this ecosystem knows what it’s doing. And maybe it will be the end of us, but at least it might not be the end of this entire planet as we know it.

DM: Yeah, I don’t think it will be the end of the entire planet – that’s something I like about Buhner’s work. He points out that our species may not persist. We may go extinct and that’s bad for us as a species since we happen to belong to that species. That may be one of the best things that could happen to the planet.

Life is really tough. It’s really resistant and resilient. And as we look at extreme environments on the planet, the most unlikely places – the bottoms of volcanic vents, miles down into the earth’s crust – you encounter living things everywhere. So life is one tough bitch in a certain way.

The conditions on the earth would have to be really extreme for all life to disappear. We know from evolutionary history that there have been times when 95% of all terrestrial organisms have disappeared. Usually that clears the deck for a new flowering and diversity in the next phase. I’m not so worried about life persisting on the planet.

Sooner or later we know there’s going to be a supernova and everything is going to be burned up but hopefully by that time we will have figured out how to get off the planet and that might be part of Gaia’s strategy – to force us to do that. It’s like these primates were the cleverest things and the stupidest things and the most dangerous development in evolution.

A lot of hopes are riding on us for being the catalyst that will enable us to escape when the time comes, but it’s sort of like working with nuclear energy. There are a lot of cool things you can do with nuclear energy. It’s not a bad thing necessarily, but it’s also extremely dangerous so it takes wisdom and that’s what we lack. I think that’s part of what the big challenge is. We are very clever, there is no doubt about that. You look at what we do – now we are clever enough to manipulate processes that could have a global impact and impact the future and now we have to get wise. That’s much harder and that’s where the teacher plants come in – they are teachers. They will teach us this lesson and like students we could pay attention or not. But we don’t pay attention to our detriment, I think.

NP: I could follow up with about two or three questions but we’re almost out of time and I want to leave a few minutes for us to talk about the Heffter Institute and maybe some new breakthroughs or new projects that are going on there that maybe you could share with us. I think that would be of great interest to our people.

DM: So as as you know the Heffter research institute is a nonprofit and we’re celebrating our 22nd anniversary. We started this in the early nineties and at the time it seemed like an aspirational idea but now everything that we envisioned – that good science done with psychedelics would result in sort of a rediscovery of their therapeutic properties and their value [we were always convinced of it] – well now it’s happening, so there is a lot of work to be done.

There has been interesting research. We have shown that on the policy and political level, these things can be studied under government-approved protocols. The challenge now is to take it to the next level and build on those discoveries and try to integrate them into medicine in whatever way that can be done. I think the hospice path is very promising, the treatment of addictions – these things are hard to ignore.

When you have a study that shows that for people who have been lifetime smokers for thirty years three packs a day, 80% of those people can give up cigarettes after two or three psilocybin sessions – that’s huge! That’s hard for government agents to dismiss because of the impact of smoking on health care. So little by little these things will be reintroduced into medicine.

I think there’s great hesitancy on the other side of accepting this because you have to acknowledge in a certain way that these medicines treat disorders of the spirit and medicine has been concerned for the past two hundred years to exercise any suggestion of a spiritual nature to believe in humanity. And psychedelics kind of put your face right into that.

But slowly these changes are happening and when it happens it’s going to transform medicine and that’s good because medicine is a very dysfunctional activity. Look at it. It’s not really about healing people. That’s almost an afterthought in terms of the way it operates. So ultimately if it transforms medicine, it will transform society. And this is happening. I guess my concern is that it’s not happening fast enough but you can only make things go so fast so hopefully we’ll get there before everything falls apart.

NP: What can our audience do to support the work and find out more and get involved? Do you have a place for them to go and find out more information?

DM: They can go to www.heffter.org – that’s our website. We are not as visible as MAPS – MAPS is the other organization. MAPS is also doing great work but they are focusing on MDMA primarily for PTSD right now. This is also good medicine and there’s a need for it and that’s where they’re putting all their resources right now to get this approved to treat primarily PTSD.

Heffter has kind of staked out psilocybin in the same way. It’s not like we got together and say “you guys do MDMA and we’ll do psilocybin.” Anybody’s free to do whatever they want. Our focus has been on psilocybin. We’ve been investigating it primarily for this end of life work and also as a tool for spiritual development, which is kind of an interesting thing.

There is a protocol at Johns Hopkins right now for religious professionals. We are trying to recruit priests and rabbis and imams and all kinds of religious professionals to enroll in this study. I’m very interested to see how many people they get and what the outcomes for some of those are. Because I think that religious professionals – they go into religion because they want to help people. There is a compassionate element there.

And just like doctors they get into these structured situations and they get very frustrated because it’s not working. I think a lot of the frustrations that doctors have is probably shared by spiritual counselors. In the context of the way it’s done it’s not working very well, so they are looking for new models. So Heffter is doing really good work and we’re facing a lot the issues MAPS is facing now, in that if these medicines are ever going to be integrated into practice, we have to change their scheduling status.

As long as they are schedule 1 it is very hard to use them outside – you can either use them illegally or in a FDA-approved protocol. They should be available to a wider population, so you have to change the status. Even though our focus is scientific, we can’t avoid these policy issues. And that’s what is going on now. We are trying to get a status change for psilocybin.

On a personal front, I’m working with some close friends and colleagues now. For a long time I’ve wanted to start a company and had these entrepreneurial aspirations, but I’ve never really had any business expertise. So a couple of years ago I met up with a couple of gentlemen who share my perspective and we’ve started a new company and it’s called Symbio Life Sciences. It covers a whole range of activities, partly around bio-sciences research, like the project we described at the GITA conference, if you’ve heard of that.

And then more towards therapeutic and educational type projects – developing new therapeutic programs to use – primarily ayahuasca.  And we have a big focus down in South America to do that.

So that’s all going forward and looking promising now. We’re getting enough seed money together so we can go ahead with this Iboga project, which I’m excited about. That’s a platform that’s going to enable us to do a lot of other things in the life sciences area. We’re very much interested in the biodiversity of the food base in South America – so many interesting foods that have never really hit the global stage. These things are fraught with challenges in a certain way but you have to preserve your ethical perspective when you get into companies and capitalism and all that.

Our corporation is a beneficial corporation, so profit is not the most important thing. Yes, we would like it to be profitable. We want there to be benefits that resolve from what we do and if we make a little less money we are fine with that. But with that attitude of course some investors say “well this is interesting, no thanks, I’ll take a pass on this” -but other people, they don’t feel that way. So I am pretty excited about that too. That’s kind of where my focus is going forward here.

NP: It feels like there’s a lot of threads here that we could talk about for a while – I’d love to do another one of these talks.

DM: Tons of stuff we could talk about.

NP: Just talking about Iboga, that can be a whole other talk. I hope this is the first of many conversations like this. So before we go I wanted to say again, Dennis’s new book “The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss” – I’m almost done with it, it’s a fantastic book. It’s adventure, it’s healing knowledge, it’s spiritual – it has everything in it. If you are a fan, which I am and I know a lot of you are fans,of Dennis and Terrence’s work together, then this is a must! Dennis where can they go to get it?

DM: Well Amazon is probably the easiest quickest way. You can also go to our website – http://www.brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss.com

There’s actually a collector’s hardcover edition you can order from that site. I don’t sell too many of those because that’s a limited edition. But the paperback you can order from there and that’s the easiest way to do it. Or you can come to some of my events because when you do a self-published book, you’re the shipping captain, the warehouse manager – so I just shipped 400 books to Hawaii yesterday so I hope I don’t have to take them home with me.

NP: I’m sure that you won’t have any left after Hawaii. Dennis it was a pleasure talking to you and I think there’s a lot more to talk about and hopefully this is going to be the first of many talks like this.

DM: I hope so, good luck with and yeah a real pleasure, Nick and Mileen. You’re doing great work – this is important work that you’re doing. I had a good time. Thanks for inviting me.

NP: Thank You!

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