A Short, Strange Trip

0:00Let's open with five hippies, all wearing white smocks, hooting through a very dense patch of jungle. They're in the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, and they're trying to get to this town called La Chirera. This is not been an easy trip. There's been detours, there's been a lot of tension among the crew, everybody is tired. Some of them have only been eating fruit, but we'll come back to that later. But then, on February 22, 1971, they reach the motherload. This is a stinky motherload, it's a bunch of piles of cow dung. But this crew is more concerned about what's growing out of this dung, which is a huge patch of shiny, gold-capped mushrooms. Their slender stems veiled with pink. These are psychedelic mushrooms, and they each took six.

1:06The leader of this little expedition is a guy named Terrence McKenna. Terrence was a complicated cat. By most accounts, a really lovely, charming, gentle guy, but with some fairly complicated ideas, he was a kind of forgotten and overlooked guru of the psychedelic sixties and seventies who had an outsized impact on the psychedelic underground in our current psychedelic movement. Today's psychedelic mushrooms are practically mainstream in the US. Tech gurus talk about microdosing them for greater productivity. People go on mushroom retreats. There's new scientific studies about their medicinal potential uses, and you can buy magic mushroom croquettes and chocolates by the mail. But back in the 1970s, this was not the case. And in this new book, journalist John O'Connor explores how we got from there to here. He says it starts with this trip to La Chirera.

2:08I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas of Scura, a celebration of the world's strange incredible and wonders places. And we're going to talk to John O'Connor, author of a short, strange trip, an untold story of magic mushrooms, madness, and a search for the meaning of life in the Amazon. Let's start with a little backstory. Lawrence McKenna grew up in Colorado, but he convinced his parents as a teenager to let him finish high school by himself in San Francisco. It was the 60s he fell in with the counter-culture crowd. You can kind of see where this is going. He went to Berkeley for a little bit, but dropped out. And then he hit the road. Lawrence drops out of college in the late 60s and watches himself on a hippie trail, which

3:08was the sitting man immersion of the late 60s and mostly among people in counter-culture who just traveled cheaply and widely, mostly in the Middle East and Far East, into India, Nepal, and Kathmandu. And he, during all these travels, he was at times shipping hash back to America, back to his brother Dennis in Colorado. Dennis, by the way, is going to become a really important part of this story. And this was in the kind of days really just before the official war on drugs, which began in 1971. He would send back these kind of incredibly redolent packages, like stinking of hash and cannabis. And he did that for a long, like very successfully for a long time until somebody in the government kind of caught with him to bid, and Dennis was arrested and booked. And Terrence basically went underground for the next couple of years. Dennis was released and the charges Gibson were dropped, and eventually they were dropped

4:09against Terrence many years later. But he was basically living under the impression that he was a lot in man and couldn't return to the United States. And so after kind of bumping around for a while, he and his brother Dennis hatched this plan. They had read this pretty obscure, like totally randomly read this leaflet from the botanical garden botanical herbaria here at Harvard, by the famed ethno-bottonist Richard Evans Shulties about a obscure losing a genus psycho-iped plant Cacugui. And Terrence and Dennis decided to launch this expedition in search of OKAY in 1971. That's what took them to watch a little. And so they set off on this journey in 1971, and who was going there with them? Because they had this kind of motley crew, that's a symbol. Yeah, we'll rag-tag group of friends and associates and maybe one odd ball who kind of dropped

5:12out halfway through who did not like Terrence in the film with the new tool. So there were four others, Dennis, as I mentioned, and three friends, one friend from New York and two friends from Berkeley. This is an even today extremely remote, difficult place to reach. There's a landing strip I flew in on there, just two flights a month, but otherwise you don't even can travel by boat or it would take several weeks to reach it by the river. They did this very, very arduous, very brave and cut a ballsy overlap hike from a small town called Porto Laguzamo in Colombia. But it was a real rag-tag, as you said, kind of motley group of hippies and wearing these white smogs. I think it was Terrence's idea to wear these white smogs, the men tended headlong beards and were beaded and just they were a real kind of shaggy hippy circus, and they had this whole menagerie of animals, a dog and a monkey. One can imagine how the indigenous folks in that area regarded them.

6:16I think you described in the book that some of them are only eating fruit as their diet. Yeah, we're really gotten a great explanation for that, but the fruitarian diet. The fruitarian diet, they would only insist it on only cutting the fruit with wooden knives as opposed to metal knives, so it's not to harm the fruit even less than they would with metal knives. And there was a lot of kind of kooky esoteric thinking going on here. One of these kind of psychedelic road trips in the kind of Algonkinsburg, Timothy Leary Mode, where they were just driven by this desire to find obscure who's in a gins and just driven by the excitement, the isolation of it, in the sense that they were really on the path to real consciousness expanding mind-blowing stuff that would ca hasten this revolution, a revolutionary moment. They did eventually make it. They had this four or five day bike, very kind of difficult and treacherous jungle led by

7:18two indigenous boys and they made it to La Troira in March 1971. La Troira is a small town along a river called the Igaripara Nah, which flows into the larger Pudamaya River and then into the Amazon. It's called La Troira because of, in Spanish, the choreo is that the shoot where the rapids come down the river and then kind of pooled in and a twist and turned through the village and, anyway, it's a really all wonderful place. John traveled there himself while researching this book and in the process, he learned a lot about the history of the area, which in the 19th century and the early 20th century had been really violently exploited by rubber barons and the rubber industry. But in the 1970s, Terence and his crew were pretty oblivious to this. They had a single-minded focus on finding drugs, which they did right away. So in the 1970s, mushrooms grow particularly well in the manure of animals. You find them in horse manure also, in goats and so on, in islands and Africa.

8:24But they do especially well in cattle manure and grow prolifically and there's not traditionally cattle in La Troira, but they were recorded by Europeans and they were brought to La Troira in the 18th, late 18th, early 19th century by visionaries. Essentially, look, all of a blue cattle, you can, I'm sure, picture them in these sort of white humpbacked cattle with these immense sift-like horns. One of the sort of offshoots of that was a lot of mushrooms, which Terence and his friends found right away and started ingesting a lot of right away, like just adding them to the meals. I mean, they were essentially on a kind of psychedelic journey from the very moment they arrived in La Troira. They were just, you know, in a real far out place from the very start. We're going to take a quick break, but when we return, the trip really begins. They were seeing everything from kind of the little people, machine elves, these sort of little

9:24of Putin-like figures, the reoccurring experience of the DMT state. It was a real magical, religious experience that they had. That's after this. When we last slept off with this band of hippie adventures, they had just arrived in La Troira and found a huge number of psilocybin mushrooms growing out of piles of dung. Now, the tripping really started. This turn wasn't quite a new set, but it made me one way to refer to what, you know, to Terence and Dennis and what were they up to as the psychonauts, which is just being kind of explorers of the outer rim of the mind with the help of psychoactive drugs. And there was very little that Terence wasn't prepared to do with that respect or Dennis for

10:27that matter. And as I lay in my book, Dennis really nearly went mad from the amount of drugs they were taking. In fact, he probably technically becomes schizophrenic for two or a few weeks. He didn't recover. He went on to have a very successful and productive professional life. He became an academic and as a robotist himself, you know, they were seeing everything from kind of, this is a kind of trope of the DMT experiences, the whole little people, machine elves, these sort of little mutant light figures as a reoccurring experience of the DMT state. I'm not going to be able to do justice to Terence's descriptions of what they saw, but it was a real magical, religious experience that they had. And it really pushed Terence into a kind of magical, religious ideology for what he thought, magic mushrooms could give us. I mean, and that's sort of part of what I argue in my book is that Terence went on to become a kind of evangelist or suicide of mushrooms. He's from stole that

11:33from indigenous Americans, from the Mazataka Indians in particular who have their own on religious ceremonies with magic mushrooms going back many generations of that century. So he kind of cribbed that idea from them, but he proselytized on their behalf basically for the rest of his life after after a true era. And so yeah, they just went on briefly out of their minds basically in short. As you mentioned, this trip kind of gets Terence thinking about almost as like cosmology or this mythology of mushrooms. His ideas go in a lot of different directions and they're kind of hard to encapsulate very quickly, but I wonder if we could try to give listeners a little bit of a sense of what he came to understand or believe about these drugs. Yeah, I mean, it probably made me the best way to talk about that is to talk about the stauntate theory, which I'm glad that we're talking about this. I'm fascinated by this. Yeah, which was kind of a theory of Terence's which was essentially in capsule form was

12:35that early hominids in East Africa discovered as they sort of migrated from lush jungle to erud Sudan as they discovered in the dung of hooked animals psychedelic motions and adjusted them. And that led to this boost the sudden surge in intellectual and sexual prowess and hunting ability and just basically provided this leap from homoreptus to homo sapiens. I want to underline this point a little bit because this is a pretty far out part of Terence's thinking on psychedelics. So after the Lacharera experiment, not only did he believe that mushrooms could have huge benefits for the people who took them, but he also thought that they could have been a driver of human evolution. Unfortunately, that's basically unprovable and unfalsifiable. I mean, it's really interesting to consider. And that would that sort of encapsulates Terence's hope for psychedelic mushrooms is that if we were taking them enough, you know, that it would lead to

13:40another leap in human evolution. And that's what he thought psychedelics were for. And there's also kind of something about when you take the mushrooms, you're able to connect with some higher consciousness or or to bridge consciousness. He thought that mushrooms or psychedelics could be used to kind of break free of this interiority and the sense of alienation and isolation from others. And you know, Terence and Dennis or at least Terence felt that there was there were several moments of real telepathy between the two of them after this big evening that they had in Lacharera, which they came to refer to as the experiment at Lacharera where they were trying to basically break through the sense of isolation that I think most of us have or stoncheness or alienation, you know, like removal from other people's consciousness. They thought there was a way to kind of bridge it. And whether they did so was obviously debatable. But Terence felt that they did. And he thought that it's the same it could be used to essentially create a collective

14:44consciousness. Terence found in these drugs sort of this antidote to the isolation feeling of isolation and some suffering. And I wonder if if you see that connection to the popularity of this tonight. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you have any experience with psychedelics, but yeah, my own experience definitely suggests that there is there is a there there. You know, there is something there. I don't want to call it therapeutic necessarily. I've never had the total kind of mind blowing, like surrealist, um, explode in Faber J. Egg kind of experience. I have, you know, let up, but I have had some some of the most memorable and magical moments in my life on psychedelics. And yeah, I think I think it's fair to say that that's one one reason people are drifting to them because for a moment that we find ourselves in is very tenuous and um, and foreboding, I think I think people are looking for some of the leap. It's been decades since the start of the war on drugs

15:48and attitudes in the US towards substances has shifted a lot. Marijuana has been legalized in nearly half of all US states. And it's possible that psychedelic mushrooms could be next. It's been decriminalized in a small handful of municipalities. And in the meantime, there's been a ton of more research about the potential medicinal benefits these drugs could have. Just this month, there was a study out of Johns Hopkins suggesting that small doses of psilocybin mushrooms could help people quit smoking. This is all to say that this has changed a lot from where things stood in 1971. So I wanted to ask John if he saw a direct link between what Terrence was doing then and where we are today. Absolutely. I mean, for first of all, they gave us, um, it was Terrence and Dennis and um, and I should emphasize the latter because it was really Dennis who figured out how to cultivate magic mushrooms at home. Not long after they returned from blood sugar, I took a little teakering, but they eventually figured it out. You know, it's, it's funny. Yeah, they're so ubiquitous now. But in the 70s, mushrooms were,

16:52were something rare. You know, LSD, mescaline, MDMA, those things were readily available. LSD invest, vast quantities, probably too vast. But mushrooms were really a novelty item in psychedelic world. And it's fair to say that Dennis was, it's not the first among the first to figure out how to, how to grow psychedelic mushrooms at home, which they then sold to friends, if gave away to friends and associates that they were at one point, I think selling between 70 and 80 pounds a week of psychedelic mushrooms. And that, that's a lot of psychedelic mushrooms, because which don't weigh very much. So I argue my book that they spark this kind of seismic shift in things in the, in the psychedelic world, the psychedelic community. And, uh, terrorists, why not, especially spent the next 30 years evangelizing about psychedelics, generally, and cell seven mushrooms in particular, and why, why we should all be taking them. John O'Connor is the author of a short, strange trip, an untold story of magic mushrooms madness

17:54and the search for the meaning of life in the Amazon. Thank you so much for your time and for talking with us. Well, thank you. It was a really different pleasure. I appreciate it. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thurris, Kelly McEvers, Doug Baldinger, Camille Stanley, Yohanna Mayor, Manola Morales, Jerome Campbell, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luce Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tindall. If you're digging our show, give us a good review and rating wherever you

18:58get your podcasts. And make sure to follow us to see you never miss an episode. We have a lot of them. I'm Amanda McGowan. I'll see you next time.