Stuff You Should Know - How Ayahuasca Works

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

One day in the Amazon Basin, a shaman put together a plant containing DMT with a vine that allows the body to absorb DMT. The combination, a foul-tasting, wildly hallucinogenic brew called ayahuasca, has changed cultures throughout the Americas.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hola, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the poor attempts at Spanish edition. And yet another drug cast covering all the drugs, everybody. One by one. And this one is ayahuasca. We'll have to do one just specifically on DMT sometime too.

All right. Because they're, you know, it's the DMT is the base of ayahuasca, but it's different. I mean, there's other stuff going on with ayahuasca that DMT doesn't have. Spoiler alert. DMT is its own thing for sure, from what I can tell. Okay. So it's agreed then, Chuck. Yeah, but you just ruined this whole episode.

Oh, sorry. Well, let's go back to the beginning then. Yeah, ayahuasca. It has a bunch of different names, and this is something I didn't know because I'm a dummy. I didn't know anything about ayahuasca except to use it as jokes. You know, it's been sort of a running punchline. Okay.

Like, you know, you have to forgive me I'm on ayahuasca, that kind of thing. I got you. But I thought it was, that was the name of like a plant and it was one plant called ayahuasca. Right. Sort of like, what's the, what's the other plant? Corn. Yeah, sort of like corn. No, the one that like, you know, the doors took the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

Oh, uh, mescaline? Yeah, mescaline. Yeah, but that's not the plant. What's the plant? Is mescaline the plant too? No, what, peyote. Peyote, that's right. But that's the mescaline buttons on a peyote plant.

Right. Which we haven't covered yet. We should do one on peyote. Bam. Another drug cast coming at you. But ayahuasca is not the name of a plant. No. Uh, it is actually a concoction made from a couple of different plants.

Yeah. Yeah. And originally it was just one plant actually known as the vine of death. Yeah. Are we going to pronounce these? Yeah. Oh, let's see what we can do. Okay.

You did the time-wasting throat clear. I know that move. I did. It's stalling. So if you go and drink ayahuasca today, you're probably getting one that's a combination of a plant called psychotria viridis. I think I got that. And a vine known as banisteriopsis copy, C-A-A-P-I.

So psychotria viridis and banisteriopatatata, man, there's a lot of letters in that one. Yeah. But it's pronounced like it looks. Yeah. Banisteriopsis. There you got it. All right. Copy.

Right. And that one, the second one, the copy is the vine, correct? That's the O-G ayahuasca ingredient. Right. The vine of death. And this is, I guess we haven't even really said, we've danced around it. It is a drug concoction that they have been taking since who knows when, but since before Europeans arrived in the New World, a long, long time in South America.

Yeah. And specifically, they think it may have originated among the Napa Runa tribe in Ecuador. Right. But it's spread throughout the Amazon basin. And today, if you are a well-to-do tech worker who makes your way down to South America, you're probably going to go to Peru to check out your ayahuasca trip. Yeah. This became a thing weirdly in Silicon Valley.

If you were a young, rich entrepreneur in Silicon Valley that has a couple of hit apps on your hand, it became a thing to throw on your hoodie and travel to South America to take part in an ayahuasca ceremony. Yep. And I'm not sure. I mean, I guess I know what happens is one dude does that and then says, bro, you got to do this. Right.

A late night conversation at Burning Man opens the floodgate. Absolutely. That's how it went down. And then before you know it, it's a thing. Right. You know, there's some kids in Silicon Valley being like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Are they making fun of us right now? Yeah.

And then they feel that hood that they've never even put over their head, itching their neck. And they're like, ah, stupid stereotypes being true. Oh man. At any rate, ayahuasca. Yes. So it did start out as a traditional thing, but there's like, you know, the whole popularity that grew among Westerners traveling down to South America for whatever reason, I'm

sure for vision quests, for fun, a drug they hadn't tried yet. Who cares? There's a lot of reasons that people travel down to South America to partake in this. Certainly most of them not nefarious or dumb, probably a lot of the reasons were great. But the influx of Westerners and Western money has radically altered ayahuasca and the ceremony ceremonies and rights and the people who perform ayahuasca ceremonies just over like the last 10 or so years dramatically. Yeah.

One might even say that the Western white man has ruined the whole thing. I think that there's, I think it's been commercialized, but that there are still very much the original or the real deal is protected in many ways by the people who are like, yeah, you guys go drink it over there, we've got our thing going on over here. Yeah. And in fact, there's at least two churches in the United States that practice ayahuasca diets that are real deal religions as far as the Supreme Court's concerned that clearly show that there is real legit ayahuasca ceremonies being practiced throughout the world.

I think both of them are from Brazil. Yeah, in 2006, the Supreme Court said that the Unio do vegetal, UDV, was a legit religion. They are in fact from Brazil, Christian spiritualists, about 17,000 adherents all over the world. And the literal translation of that religion is the union of the plants. So it's like a plant religion and ayahuasca is at the center of this. Yeah, the other one is a Christian syncretism, which is like Santo Daimei. Yeah. That one is like they incorporate not just indigenous Brazilian and South American beliefs,

but also some African indigenous beliefs or folk beliefs as well. Like it's a whole very big inclusive pantheon that is centered around visions from ayahuasca and like an ayahuasca sacrament. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, both protected in the United States by law now that this plant concoction is part of their religion. They cannot be arrested for doing this because the legalities of it is technically illegal. It's a little gray whether or not the actual plant is illegal.

Is that right? Yeah, supposedly the plants themselves are not illegal. It's the combination or the brew made from them that's illegal. Gotcha. That's what I saw. I don't know that that's necessarily true. And I would guess if the plants are still legal now, they won't be in two, three years. Right.

Because you know, why make it legal? Why let it be legal? Yeah, something people get enjoyment for that comes from the earth. Let's outlaw it. Yeah, I don't know if enjoyment's quite the right word though from the way that the Grabster puts it that an ayahuasca trip is not necessarily fun. It's a harrowing psychological spiritual journey that you're undertaking. All right.

Let's take a break. Okay. All right. Let's see you getting excited over there. And we'll talk a little bit more about DMT and kind of what's going on in your body physiologically right after this. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb?

And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. But yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. This episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you

get your podcasts. All right, so DMT, which you mentioned at the onset, the one part of this concoction, the P Veritas, contains DMT. You're going to pronounce that? Oh, yes. It's diamethyl tryptamine. Oh, look at you. It just rolls off the tongue now, doesn't it?

So this is something not exclusive to P Veritas. It's found in a bunch of psychedelic substances and this is something that can cause hallucinations perhaps, changes in your perception, your state of consciousness, your sense of self, which we'll really get into because it has a lot to do with the ayahuasca journey. However, if you just eat the DMT, it's not going to have this kind of effect on you because there's an enzyme called monoamine oxidase and that's going to break it down in your digestive system before it gets absorbed. So you have to combine it with this copyvine, which prevents the uptake of it.

Yeah, the copyvine has an alkaloid called a harmala alkaloid and harmolines are psychotropic in of themselves, which is why the copyvine alone used to just be ayahuasca. But the fact that it prevents the monoamine oxidase to break down the DMT, it allows your body to absorb it and all of a sudden you're tripping balls. Although I hear it's not all of a sudden, I think it takes a good 30 minutes to come on and then it takes like a supplementary boost an hour or so later to really bring on the kind of transcendent experience that people are looking for when they take ayahuasca. So you've got the DMT being absorbed.

That's the one-two punch, right? You've got the DMT itself and then you've got the plant that allows the DMT to be absorbed. And when you put those two things together, the piviridus and the b-copy, that's the ayahuasca that you read about in vice. That's what they're talking about. Yeah, and this is administered by a shaman, someone who ideally is a shaman that knows what they're doing. And there are sometimes other plants that are brewed in there as well, but not always.

And sometimes it's brewed separately and then combined later. Sometimes it all depends on which shaman you go to of what the ritual is like. Sometimes you're included as part of it. Sometimes it's like a thick liquid tea. Sometimes it's a paste. It's been described no matter what it is. It seems like around the horn, everybody says it tastes awful. So awful that you can very easily throw up, which is something that's pretty common with

an ayahuasca experience. I didn't get that from the taste though. I got that that was like once it's in your body, it makes you nauseous and you throw up. Right. Not like, oh, this tastes so bad. I'm going to puke it up. And it wouldn't be in your body long enough to be absorbed, right?

But I think the taste and the memory of the taste combined with the nausea is enough to throw up. But whether you do throw up or not, it's not necessarily like 100% you're going to throw up. One of the points of an ayahuasca ceremony is to throw up. You're meant to throw up. And you will actually be forced into this either if you don't do it from the ayahuasca ceremony.

You may also be given something like tobacco juice, like a water with tobacco that's soaked in it for a while and you'll be told to drink that so that you will throw up because this idea of purging, whether it's throwing up or diarrhea is a very frequent side effect of ayahuasca. Very frequent. You are meant to be purging your body and it's meant to be this kind of symbolic spiritual purge of your ego, of all the nastiness, of all the horribleness that's a part of you. You're getting it out as part of the trip and as the trip sets in.

Yeah. And the taste has been described. The New York Times has said it's like a muddy herbal taste. Someone from vox.com took it again. I'm Sean Illing. He described it as a cup of motor oil diluted with a splash of water. Right. I read it's almost as gross as a necko wafer.

I don't think I've ever had a necko wafer. Good on you. Have you? No. What am I crazy? What are they? Nucko wafers. They're like old-timey kind of like chalky candy that comes in a roll.

You've seen them. Probably. You've seen them. And my old-timey candy days. Exactly. I'm sure I did. So, all right, I guess we should talk a little bit about, like you said, it's origins in the Napo River Basin by this Runa tribe, like you said.

And it's called the Vine of Death or the Mother Vine, this copy. And they think that early on they may have just taken this copy by itself, right? Right. Because it's like without the brew. It's got the harmolines in it. It's not only an MAOI, but also has like its own kind of psychoactive stuff going on. So that was the original ayahuasca. Yeah.

And we have written accounts from like the 1700s when Jesuits would go to the Amazon to try and, you know, Christianize folks. And trip balls. Yeah. Because I'm sure the entry was like, whoa. And that's it. Did you hear about the guy that was just killed, the missionary? Yes.

On Sentinel Island. Yeah. And he, it was like something from a movie. He went at first and a child shot an arrow through a Bible that he was holding, apparently. I hadn't heard about that. Yeah. Because he had, he went back a few times and was like journaling about it and said he basically like held up his Bible, it's like something from a movie and an arrow was shot

through it. And I'm like, dude, if that is not, like if you believe in God, that's a sign from God. Well, you remember the turn around. The man in the whole episode, we talked about them. Yeah. They were the ones that like you, like everyone knew you just don't go anywhere near them. And some fishermen had been killed like years, a few years back. And this guy, I guess had tried, he decided he was going to be the one.

Yeah. I don't actually know enough about the story, but he clearly was trying to gain access to them. Yeah. Yeah. He was trying to spread the word of Jesus and paid, like you're not supposed, it's illegal, I think, to even trespass there, but he paid people sort of under the table to take him there.

And they did so. And those people were arrested and his family is saying, you need to let these people go because he like really wanted to do this. I see. It's very interesting. Yeah, it is. It's crazy. But I just like, that sounds like something you would make up from a movie, like shooting

an arrow through the Bible, they're holding up, you know. So we got a little sidetrack, but we were talking about the Jesuits, like having this on record in the 1700s when they went and they were like, hey, there's something going down here that's very interesting. Yeah. And even William S. Burroughs wrote the Yahe letters in 1963, and it was about his experience with the ayahuasca vine. And apparently the practitioners at the time knew well into the 20th century that you could

combine it with the pevoritis vine and have a completely different experience, but that wasn't necessarily the point. That was like an optional ceremony you could perform, but the most widespread and traditional ceremony was just the vine of death, right? Yeah. And then at some point, somebody started putting them together and worried about this got out in the mid 2000s is when it just ayahuasca hit the public consciousness in the West. Yeah.

I mean, in the 60s, of course, in certain subcultures in America, they knew about it because of William S. Burroughs and people seeking out things like peyote and all kinds of psychedelic experiences, but it definitely was not in the mainstream until not too long ago. And still, I think even at the time, it was strictly the harmolines and just the vine that was being used, the copy vine, it wasn't somebody started putting it together frequently with the veritis plant, and that's when it became hugely popular. Yeah.

So popular now that there is ayahuasca tourism. Big time. What's going on in South America and said the central part is Peru's Arumbamba Valley. And if you were going down for an ayahuasca experience, like a spiritual quest is the reason you're going down there, I don't fault you for that at all, but you have to do your research. You can't just show up in South America and be like, all right, somebody give me some ayahuasca because there are a lot of inscrubulous and nefarious outfits that have come up to take

advantage explicitly of that kind of Western tourists. The ill-informed Western tourists who is going to have a horrible, terrible trip and not going to get the spiritual experience you're looking for. So you have to do your research because there are some legitimate ayahuasca outfits in South America, but you're not going to take you if you just show up down there and you're going to end up in a bad situation. Yeah, for sure. So taking part in one of these ceremonies, let's say you do find like a legit shaman

who's willing to take your American dollars or whatever, however you're paying your gold ingots and trinkets. It's sort of funny. It all goes back to Burroughs with the set and setting thing, which is what he famously preached about any psychedelic experience is to really put a lot of thought into the set and the setting where you're going to do this. So it goes well for you. So as this concoction is being brewed, like I said before, sometimes you're taking part

in this and helping to mash it up and brew the tea, but what they're really trying to do is the whole ceremony isn't just like for show. It's all part of the thing to get you settled in and focused on kind of the right things going in. Like what do you want to accomplish here? What do you want to find out about yourself? What questions do you have about yourself and really get into that frame of mind as they hand you your puke bucket, although I would recommend bringing your own.

Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I would not want a reused puke bucket. Good Lord. I hadn't even considered that. It would be BYOB for me. So yeah, I can just totally see how as a Westerner, you would just be like, come on, we don't need this ceremony. Let's just give me the good stuff.

But like you said, the point is to ease you into it to get your mind and body prepared for this enormous trip you're about to go on because if you just get dropped right in the middle of it without any kind of preparation or without any kind of assistance, you're going to lose your marbles pretty well. So that is a big part of going on an ayahuasca journey is having somebody who's competent, trained and empathetic and willing to stay there with you, to prepare you, to stay with you, to keep an eye on you. You need to be monitored.

You can't be up and just running off into the jungle by yourself because terrible things are going to happen to you in that situation. And then to help you afterward as well. And from some of the preliminary research that's starting to come in, if you undertake an ayahuasca journey, I guess, is the best word I can come up with, under the right setting, under the right guidance, with the right support, both pre-during and after, it can have profound effects on your spirituality and your sense of connectedness to the universe. It can also possibly help you with diagnosed mental illness as well.

Yeah, we'll get to the mental illness part at the end, but just your standard is sort of a truth seeker, let's say. It's very much tied into ideal conditions in the 60s and 70s, well, I guess beyond, the LSD experience, and that there was a lot of talk in the 60s about the ego. And every hip musician in the United States talked about stripping away the ego from Brian Wilson to the mamas and the papas to Neil Young, is stripping away that ego of yourself basically, which means kind of getting outside yourself to the point where you're not looking at the world around you and how it affects you.

But there is no you, there is no, it's a loss of self such that's so profound that you can only see the world and people around you as they exist in reality. It's a pretty sort of deep trippy thing to try and describe in words on a podcast. But I think that's sort of the general thing is washing that ego down to where it's not around anymore, and you get like a true sense of the world around you, like maybe for the first time. Yeah, yeah, the ego in and of itself isn't a bad thing, like they think that it developed among animals is a, like that's your sense of self-awareness.

That's the thing that leads you to want to preserve your own life, to get away from danger, to realize that like you can die because there is a you, right? It's a very basic thing. The problem is in humans, as we've evolved, our ego has also evolved and it can get to a point where it's unhealthy. It's kind of toxic. It can help you develop bad relationships. People don't want to be around you.

It can also affect your self-esteem if your ego's underdeveloped. There's a lot of problems that can go wrong with the ego. And so a lot of people who prescribe psychedelics to deal with that kind of thing, say psychedelics strip away the ego. And now that we've gotten to the point where we are advanced enough as a civilization that we can give people acid and put them in an MRI machine, the wonder machine and watch what happens, we've shown that, yes, it seems like the areas that are responsible for generating the ego, they get kind of turned off while you're under the influence of psychedelics.

And it allows you to connect, to see outside of yourself, to see that you are connected with all of this other stuff. So this whole ego depletion or ego stripping, it's a major component of not just ayahuasca, but all psychedelics. But it's a big reason why people undertake ayahuasca journeys again. I love it every time you say that. But get this, there was something I hadn't realized before, Chuck, from those MRI studies, they found that there's something called the default mode network, which is the thing

that keeps your body humming and keeps your, it's the part of your brain that's going while you're not thinking, right? And they found that when the default mode network is suppressed and your frontal cortex is activated, that's when it seems that your ego is at the least, it's when your ego is turned off and you're free to connect with the universe or whatever, right? Well, that default mode network is a very primitive part of our brain, it's a very primitive system of our brain. And it kind of suggests in a way that the loss of ego is something that we may eventually

evolve to. Oh, wow. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Because if your frontal cortex is what's being activated and your default mode network is inactivated, that's like your ancient brain and your evolved brain, one's activated and one's suppressed and your ego's gone. That says to me like, well, yeah, if we keep evolving a frontal cortex, I wonder if we'll

lose our ego at some point or at least it'll be radically altered. Interesting. I thought so too. Yeah. So what can happen, like any sort of psychedelic trip, it's going to be completely singular to the person that's doing it. There is no across the board sort of sweeping statements you can make, but you strip away that ego and anything can happen from feeling more connected to the universe or the earth

or the tree you're leaning against or maybe the father that passed away when you were a child that you didn't have a relationship with or the loved one that you currently have a toxic relationship with. You can feel sort of a, not imaginary, but it is in your mind, but a bond in that they're not like right there in front of you. Just new understandings of relationships that may be complicated or toxic in your life. Right, exactly. Like you're seeing them in a different way because of that ego loss.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fascinating. And like you said, it is symbolic death of the ego, which is why that vomiting is important, like in theory, I guess you're vomiting up that ego and then it's go time. Apparently, you can hallucinate your death and like you said before, it's not often looked at as like, hey man, this is going to be a great time, but at the same time, I think it's also typically not like looked at as like some horror show that you're about to

undergo, although it can be, but it's just a profound emotional and psychological experience. Right. Exactly. I've never done it. Not me either. This is from researching it. Right. Exactly.

Which is like, we've never been to the sun either, but we talked about that. Yeah. And that went great. Actually, now that you mentioned it, should use a different example. Let's take another break and then we'll talk about what you kind of teased earlier with ayahuasca and how it could be used to treat addiction or PTSD or other mental illnesses right after this. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could

my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard tree house and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, so we're back and we're talking about using ayahuasca as a tool, like taking that experience of being outside of yourself, of connected to the rest of the universe, of re-evaluating your life in a lot of ways to cure mental illness. One of the things that it's been, I guess some studies have actually shown like, no, this actually works, is to treat addiction, whether it's cigarettes or booze or drugs or whatever that you can undergo in ayahuasca ceremony people have and have come out on

the other side like, I'm good, I don't need that, the cigarettes or booze or drugs or whatever. Yeah. And one of the suggestions for what's going on with this that I saw is that you are actually healing the psychic damage that's causing you to self-medicate in the first place. Right, something probably from your past. And then so you, without that need to self-medicate, you don't have necessarily the desire to drink or smoke cigarettes or whatever that you used to, which is a different model of addiction

that's kind of starting to gain a little bit of traction but is also very controversial because it makes it sound like addiction is a choice, like you're self-medicating, you're choosing to do all those drugs and like throw your life away because of some psychic trauma. But there does seem to be a camp in medicine that is saying like, this actually might have legs, it kind of makes a lot of sense. And from what I can tell those ayahuasca studies kind of are a check mark in that view's favor. Yeah. And I think that can work in conjunction with the other piece, which is removing that ego

even if it's for whatever, how many hours that you're undergoing this trip, could just simply disrupt that, you know, you often hear about addiction being like this sort of cycle, like a cyclical thing, and even just disrupting that cyclical path or that circular path can be enough to sort of get you on the off ramp from using. Yeah. Get you on the off ramp? Get you, yeah, on the off ramp. Yes.

That's what you said, right? Yeah. And then eventually off that off ramp onto a nice chill side street. Yeah. And then maybe a nice drive into the country, pass a few cows, and then sleep. Yeah. I had a therapist one time that talked about getting off of the highway, it was a metaphor that actually worked for me, but like choosing to get off the highway when certain things

were happening and sometimes something that simple is just kind of clicks in. You're like, oh, if I notice something's going on, I'm speeding down the highway toward the badness and just get on that exit ramp, and now I'm in my neighborhood. Now I'm hanging out with cows in a nice bucolic pasture. PTSD is another specifically, I think a lot of times with military PTSD, they've been, you know, using psychedelics more and more in ayahuasca is no stranger to this treatment. And while it is not a magic pill, they are doing some studies on this and it seems like, and like with all these, it's tough to get funding for these kind of studies sometimes,

but it does seem like it's gaining more ground in the medical community to try out these kind of experiments. Well, they're trying like hell to get some of these studies underway in the United States, but because ayahuasca is considered a schedule one drug, which is the worst, most nefarious drugs of all, they can't. I don't think there's been a single study in the U.S., but fortunately they can just go down to South America and do the best they can with some of the ayahuasca centers that are down there.

And they're like, again, there are some legitimate ayahuasca centers that take Western tourists for ayahuasca journeys, and some groups are going down there to partner with those centers to study people. Some of the people they're trying to study are PTSD patients, and they think that if ayahuasca is helping people with PTSD, which it seems to be, it's basically negative exposure therapy where you're dredging up all of those worst, your worst memories that are causing your PTSD, which is bringing them to the surface and allowing your awareness to kind of shine a light on them and say, okay, I'm going to recategorize these now, and they're not being

categorized as bad and frightening as they were before. It's not as traumatic as they were originally categorized. Yeah, and specifically in this study that you're talking about is combat veterans suffering from PTSD, and it's the temple of the way of light. The Amazon has partnered with a group in Spain and the UK, the International Center for Ethnobotanical Research and Service in Spain, and then the Beckley Foundation in the UK, and they're treating close to 600 combat veterans a year, and it says it's the largest psychedelic study ever undertaken.

Oh, wow. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, I know that they're using MDMA to treat PTSD as well, and then I can't remember the name of that one treatment, but remember you follow a pen with your eyes while you're going over your worst memory, and it recategorizes the memories as less scary? I don't remember that one. Yeah, I can't remember what we talked about it in, but that apparently works really well too.

Without the vomiting. Right. That's a big part of it, though, my friend, just bring your own bucket. Problems with ayahuasca, it is not generally toxic, and you would have to take so much ayahuasca. It's sort of like when we were talking about marijuana, like is there even a lethal dose? Can you even say that? Is the lethal dose apparently for ayahuasca is 20 times what you would normally take in

a typical ceremony? As the Grabster put it, he might have been quoting someone, but could anyone even choke this much of that down? Right, probably not. Is that even possible? But there have been some deaths that have been related to ayahuasca, and when you dig a little deeper, you find like, oh, it wasn't actually the ayahuasca directly that caused this, but the people would not have died had they not been in South America on the ayahuasca

journey. Right? Yeah. That's a good way to say it. There's this one guy who died in, I believe, 2014, he was an American, I know he's British, I'm sorry, and his name was Henry Miller, and he died on the way to the hospital because he'd gone kind of non-responsive, and the ayahuasqueros that took him to the hospital had him on a motorcycle, and he fell off the motorcycle and died of a head injury on the

way to the hospital. So it wasn't the ayahuasca that killed him, but he wouldn't have been on the motorcycle in the first place had he not been on this ayahuasca trip. So the shorthand and the headlines is a man dies from ayahuasca. Yeah, there've been some other cases where people would be having a bad trip and maybe attack someone else, and that would lead to violence or death, or just this year in 2018 in Peru, an 81-year-old shaman woman was shot and killed, and then a Canadian man was murdered for revenge for that killing.

But supposedly this had nothing to do with being under the influence, but it was some sort of dispute that happened during this whole conflict. Yeah, the woman was named Olivia Aravallo, and she was the spiritual mother of Peru's second largest indigenous tribe, the Shepibo Conebo, and this guy, this Canadian guy named Sebastian Woodruff, shot and killed her allegedly because her son owed him money. He was there to learn ayahuasca, and he didn't feel like he'd gotten his money's worth. So he killed her, he killed this woman, the shaman, the spiritual leader of the second largest tribe in Peru.

And he was Canadian? Yeah, I know, it's surprising. Not a very Canadian thing to do. No, it really wasn't. But the whole thing really revealed the problems that have been developing from this ayahuasca tourism. First, this guy was down there and wanted to learn about ayahuasca so he could take it back to Canada and appropriate this culture.

Right. And one, two, he didn't get his money's worth, so he shot and killed the woman who was supposed to be teaching him. It's a big problem as well. But then also between the ayahuasqueros and the practitioners who are hosting these tourists, and then the governments of the countries that they're hosting them in, there's tensions there as well, because this village said there's police everywhere. The police never come here.

Yeah. Every man goes missing and now our village is overrun with police, like what's going on here? So there's a lot of tension that's being, there's a lot of simmering tension that's being heated by this western ayahuasca tourism. And it's kind of largely in part because it's unregulated, but also because a lot of people going down there don't have respect for what they're doing. Right.

And a lot of the people who are popping up as ayahuasqueros don't have any respect for what they're doing either. So the respect that's been given to this tradition for so many hundreds or thousands of years is being lost. And then on top of that, the ayahuasca that they're drinking is so wildly more potent than what it traditionally was all those hundreds of thousands of years, the Jesuits version of ayahuasca. It's really kind of, I think, fueling this kind of recklessness that's becoming part

and parcel with ayahuasca used down in South America. Yeah. Because some of these areas are poor. And so all of a sudden it becomes a hip thing for westerners with money to come down there with cold hard cash. And then, like you said, they're appropriating their culture. So that's one strike. But then to appeal to these people, all of a sudden they're not as like, we don't want

to freak people out maybe by being too traditional. So we're going to westernize our own methods a bit. So let's get a website going and then we'll be the go-to for when they come down here. So then they're undermining their own culture and it's just sort of becoming a big mess, it sounds like. Yeah. So if you're going down there, like whether you're western or Asian or whoever you are, if you're going down for a vision quest, that's not what's being brought out as the fault.

The fault is if you're going down there because it's hip or because you just want to party or because a friend did it and you're not being respectful of it, then that's where the issue seems to be arising from. Yeah. Ayahuasca. You got anything else? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

There is one thing that we didn't cover that can happen because the copyvine is a MAO inhibitor. There's a lot of other things that can actually kill you that are pretty normal. Like interactions. You can have drug interactions with things as normal as chocolate. Because the monoamine oxidase typically breaks these things down and if it's being inhibited so that the ayahuasca can work its effects, if you eat chocolate, you're toast. And one of the other things that it can do is, so the MAOIs prevent your serotonin from being taken up and that's how DMT acts on the brain.

It goes into where serotonin receptors normally fit and just says let's party, right? Yeah. So with all this extra serotonin floating around, if you also happen to be on an SSRI, serotonin reuptake inhibitor, you've got too much serotonin. You can go into what's called serotonin shock. This is where the diarrhea comes in. That's one of the symptoms of serotonin shock, but that's one of the mild symptoms. You can also have seizures.

Your heart can also stop and you can die from having too much serotonin flooding your brain. So that is a direct way you can die from ayahuasca, but it's not from the hallucinogen aspect of it. It's from the MAOI. So when they show up from the Silicon Valley and they say they're translating and they're like, hey bro, he wants to know if you've had anything in your body and then you're like, no, just my Selexa and a wolf down at Toblerone on the way over. I'm good.

Right. Let's do this. It's a ceremony. Just let me drink that stuff. Right. You just, yeah, you mash the shaman's face out of your way and like, get out of here. Just give me that. Now, I know why we haven't been selling tickets in Seattle so much.

Oh no. Seattle, we love. That's not Silicon Valley. Oh, that's right. Well, San Francisco too. We love all people. We love all of you, everybody. We love all potential ticket buyers.

Our egos are down in the pits. If you want to know more about ayahuasca, man, do some research. There's a lot of it out there. So do it. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this short and sweet, but we did get an answer to something. Remember in the Fire Twux episode, you could not remember that game and we got everything from Sim City to.

Civilization. Yeah. None of them were right. But our friend, our new pal, Mike Mangoba, says this, guys that just listened to the Fire Twux episode and also shout out to two things, all the people who wrote in and spelled it Fire Twux. Yeah. And then all the firefighters.

We heard from a lot of firefighters. And they all, every single one of them said, yep, it's chilly, Josh did not overstate the chilly thing. Yeah. And they're all very nice and said, you guys got most of this right. Any time it's something really specific like that, we're going to get some stuff wrong. But they were like, you guys did a good job. And one of them even had a joke that said, if you're at a party, how do you know if there's

a firefighter there? And the answer is, oh, don't worry, they'll tell you. That was from a firefighter. Nice. So I guess they have a symptom about it. So anyway, guys, listen to the Fire Twux episode and you talked about the old game that burns buildings to the ground if you don't have a fire station. And that game is called Pharaoh.

Yes. P-H-A-R-A-O-H. Yep. You're building an Egyptian civilization. Yep. And he said, it's an expansion game. The expansion game is called Cleopatra. And it was one of my favorite games, which I still play today.

Keep up the chatter. Mike Mangoba. Thanks a lot, Mike. That's exactly what it was. I never in a million years would have remembered that, but it was indeed. Gobes. Oh, is that what we're calling him? Yeah.

All right. Thanks a lot, Gobes. Well, if you want to know more about it, you can find out in the description down below. Thanks a lot, Mike. Thanks a lot, Mike. Thanks a lot, Mike. That's exactly what it was.

It was indeed. Gobes. Oh, is that what we're calling him? Yeah. All right. Thanks a lot, Gobes. Well, if you want to be like Gobes and rescue us by reminding me of something I can't remember what it was, or just correcting my syntax, you can get in touch with us.

We're all over social. You can find those links at StuffYouShouldKnow.com. And you can just send us an email. Wrap it up. Spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast.HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Thanks a lot, Mike. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.