Psychedelics have been the subject of renewed interest over the past decade, at a level not seen since Richard Nixon’s administration declared a “war on drugs,” making them illegal and abruptly ending all research into their potential benefits for mental health. Since 2020, dozens of U.S. cities, including the nation’s capital, have decriminalized the use and possession of psychedelics. This year, so far, five U.S. states are poised to legalize psychedelics, including the Republican stronghold state of Missouri as well as Nevada, which voted for President Donald Trump in 2024. They follow Colorado and Oregon, where “magic” mushrooms and other psychedelics are already on offer at luxury retreats. And at the time of writing, the state Senate in Virginia has advanced a bill that would fund clinical trials focused on “breakthrough therapies” like psychedelic-assisted therapy, specifically targeting military veterans who suffer from chronic depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and who have been resistant to conventional treatment. In Canada, therapists can already prescribe psilocybin and MDMA (a synthetic stimulant and psychedelia-inducing molecule) for psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat a variety of conditions, including depression, anxiety and PTSD. And in the European Union, a citizens’ petition aims to garner 1 million signatures to bring the issue of legalizing psychedelics before the European Commission for consideration.
Among the psychedelics that are part of this international conversation is the Amazonian plant ayahuasca, which, in Quechua, the Indigenous language of the Andes mountains, means “vine of the dead” or “vine of the soul.” When combined with specific plants, ayahuasca makes a powerful psychoactive brew used for centuries in South American spiritual and medicinal practices, usually imbibed in ceremonial settings that include live music, singing and — depending on the tribe’s tradition — dancing. In recent years, it has also attracted interest in some Western mental health discussions for its potential to treat conditions like PTSD, depression and addiction. The sale, possession and cultivation of ayahuasca is legal in countries where Indigenous practices have long incorporated it, such as Brazil and Peru. It is increasingly tolerated in the European countries with the most contact with South America, like Portugal and Spain, and although it remains illegal at the federal level in the United States, the law exempts religious organizations from the prohibition.
Yet as headlines buzz with excitement over the creeping U.S. legalization of such ancient healing practices for treating our modern mental health ailments, a potentially counterproductive narrative is quietly unfolding in parallel.
Big Pharma, now entering the scene, aims to patent and monetize these often wild-grown medicines, to “tame” their unpredictable nature and offer them in a setting that is potentially stripped from the mystical and communal contexts in which they have evolved. The rush to apply potential “breakthrough” fixes to mental health is already attracting billions of dollars of investment as well as the attention of major Big Pharma brands like Johnson & Johnson, with many other younger pharmaceutical and biotech companies joining the fray.
For instance, the New York-based Gilgamesh is developing a line of “non-hallucinogenic neuroplastogens,” or psychedelics without the psychedelic effect, as is the Florida-based Enveric Biosciences and dozens of other pharmaceuticals in the U.S. and abroad. Filament Health, based in Canada, is currently working on creating a pharmaceutical version of ayahuasca, dubbed “pharmahuasca” by some detractors. In their laboratories, they are dissecting the brew’s components to produce a controlled, clinical product. The goal? To eliminate what can sometimes manifest as intense vomiting, or what many participants describe as “purging,” which to them feels more like offloading emotional baggage stored in the body than the classic sensations of nausea, vomiting or diarrhea that one associates with physical ailments. In traditional settings in the Amazon, local participants don’t even say, “I’m going to a ceremony,” but rather “I’m going to purge” or “to drink the purge,” and the healer is referred to as “el purguero,” or “the one who induces the purge” — because the process of purging is considered integral to the healing it provides.
In addition to removing the purge, which can also manifest as tears, sweats and shakes, the corporate approach aims to remove the emotional upheaval and potentially harrowing encounters with one’s “shadow” — the dark thoughts and emotions that we hide from ourselves — that are intrinsic to the ayahuasca experience and the healing that follows. Similar efforts are being applied to psilocybin, whereby pharmaceutical companies are racing to create patented versions of “clean” psychedelics that provide the supposed mental health benefits without the more mystical — and often profound, challenging and life-changing — elements of the process. For example, during a therapeutic psilocybin session, or “journey,” that was attended by New Lines, one individual felt the emotion of grief “moving” through the chest area as they quietly shed continuous tears for hours. Asked later about whether the experience offered a catharsis, the individual, who shared their experience on condition of anonymity, said: “It was one of the most intense experiences of my life! I had no idea I was holding so much grief in my body … years and years of it, sitting and accumulating. No wonder I kept complaining of chest pain.” They continued: “And I don’t feel that heaviness on the heart anymore. I don’t feel that pain in the chest anymore.” But before arriving at “the sense of peace” that they described, they “literally felt every ounce of the pain and grief” after imbibing the medicine. “During the journey I had no choice but to face the pain … to embrace it, to feel it wholeheartedly in every cell in my body. And it was very painful to feel,” the person continued.
Experienced psychonauts — the insiders’ term for people who explore consciousness through the use of psychedelics, akin to “astronauts” of the psyche — often talk about “trusting the medicine” to show the participant what they need to learn about themselves or the world around them. Participants are therefore encouraged not to resist any unpleasantness that may arise within them; emotions like anger, fear, sadness and grief are all welcome during the psychedelic session. Embracing these emotions is the key to transcending their grip on one’s life. It is not uncommon for a participant to have a challenging psychedelic experience as they maneuver through difficult inner terrain, only to feel “transformed” when the session is over — just like the person who shared their experience about grief. By eliminating the personal struggle, which can include purging, the proposed new corporate approach leaves deeper questions unanswered: Can we truly separate the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics from the very discomfort that ushers in the healing? Can we produce a new and improved antidepressant or antianxiety pill that, unlike the current psychiatric drugs available today, heals the cause of disease rather than neutralizing its symptoms? And, perhaps more fundamentally, will this new approach, unfolding in a very different context from that in which the psychedelics evolved, potentially cause more harm than good?
In January, one of the authors of this essay attended a series of ayahuasca ceremonies in the Sacred Valley in Peru, hosted by the respected medicine man (or ayahuasquero), author and musician Alonso Del Rio. In his book, “The Four Altars,” Del Rio articulates his views on the main cultural break between modernity and antiquity, a schism that ushered in the age of science but arguably remains responsible for many of today’s societal ills: loneliness, anxiety and people’s sense of alienation from the environment and each other. It is what he describes as a detrimental split between the material world and the spirit.
“We can see this breaking point clearly expressed through Ockham’s nominalism, Locke’s rationalism, and Hume’s skepticism. It was the decimation of a marvelous trinity that had sustained the balance (between science, ethics and aesthetics) for centuries,” he writes. Del Rio has been drinking ayahuasca twice per week for the past 40 years and has led ceremonies for thousands of Westerners who have been part of this renaissance; seekers who travel to the Amazon and the Sacred Valley in search of the entheogenic experience and the sense of meaning and healing it can provide. In his quote about the “marvelous trinity” above, he is referring to the Latin bonum, pulchrum and verum (goodness/ethics, beauty/aesthetics and truth/science), the Platonic ideal for which one should strive.
“By removing science from the concepts that helped regulate it, thus began a race for development that violated the natural order and equilibrium: establishing not just a separation, but a divorce between humanity and nature, science and truth,” Del Rio adds. “In the last two hundred years, the destructive potential of human beings has been enhanced by the intensity of an unhinged and incomplete intellect, incapable of recognizing the sacredness of nature and seeing ‘God’ within it.”
Modern-day loneliness and our prevalent sense of isolation can — and often do — chip away at our mental health, as do our hectic lifestyles and relentless pursuit of material goods. Could the repurposing of an ancient remedy by one of the main pillars of our age of neurosis (i.e., the pharmaceutical industry) produce a panacea for our contemporary ills? Or is the corporate approach to psychedelics simply another example of science divorced from the ethics and aesthetics that ought to shape it?
The use of psychedelics in ritual and healing spans ancient societies across the world, from Japan to ancient Egypt and from Siberia to sub-Saharan Africa. This has been shown in new research, thanks in part to more sensitive testing methods and equipment that can identify psychotropic components in archaeological finds.
To take one example, a fungus with psychedelic qualities known as ergot was found inside a kykeon drinking vase in an ancient Greek temple dedicated to the Eleusinian goddesses. In the Eleusinian Mysteries — a series of secret rituals and reenactments attended by Plato — Persephone, the goddess of spring and nature, is kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld, plunging the world into a barren winter. Her mother, Demeter, is devastated and, in her grief, causes the Earth to stop producing. It is only after a lengthy struggle that Persephone is allowed to return, but not before consuming pomegranate seeds that bind her to the underworld for part of each year. This cyclical descent into darkness and return to light became symbolic of the seasonal changes, representing the cycle of life, death and rebirth — a cycle also central to the medicinal psychedelic experience.
But in the approach proposed by pharmaceutical companies, psychedelics stand to bypass this natural cycle of change, death and rebirth. In doing so, pharma-psychedelics (or perhaps one might call them “pharma-delics”) will not just remove the “adversity” from the hero’s journey but may do away with the journey itself. Just as with Persephone’s journey, without struggle comes no change and, without change, the cycle of life itself remains stagnant.
During many of the traditions or ceremonies associated with the use of psychedelics, participants have reported experiencing “oneness with the universe” or compassion for an otherwise sworn enemy. They can even have vivid visions that are sometimes shared by more than one person simultaneously. Volunteers at Imperial College London and the University of California, San Diego, who received the powerful psychedelic dimethyltryptamine (DMT) intravenously during a study of its effects on the brain, reported “meeting” the same “sentient being” who sought to teach them moral lessons. People describe having “met” their own demons, slayed their own dragons or become different, multiple selves, which can manifest somatically, in the body, with visceral sensations of pain and pleasure, in ways that make no sense to the sober mind. It is not unusual for someone to describe having become “a drop of water in the ocean,” having been “eaten by a raptor” or, as one of these authors experienced recently, having become so expansive as to contain the sun and the moon and the entirety of the Milky Way all together at once.
It is indeed a state resembling psychosis, only temporary, and, with the right support, it can offer the participant unmatched insight into their own psyche and sometimes even the world around them. There are many examples of people having life-changing epiphanies during this altered state of consciousness, such as the Nobel laureates Francis Crick, who identified the double-helix structure of DNA while reportedly under the influence of LSD, and Kary Mullis, who invented polymerase chain reactions to enable the study of DNA. The late American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna even hypothesized in his book “Food of the Gods” that it was our ancestral encounters with psychedelics that made us fully human — that the psychotropic mushrooms, cacti or plants (or some combination thereof, as with ayahuasca) were what “switched on” our human mind.
During the psychedelic experience, the ego can soften or even disintegrate, loosening one’s thought processes and sense of self. Recent research has shown that psychedelics can induce a state of increased neuroplasticity, allowing greater than normal change to the structure and function of neural pathways in the brain. This state of neuroplasticity, which otherwise tends to decrease with age, lasts for several days or longer after a psychedelic experience. And it may allow a person to introduce a healthier rewiring of their brain, changing neural patterns that manifested in a person’s life as rigid thinking or as an unhealthy sense of self beholden to the kind of uncontrollable emotional triggers that afflict, say, someone with poor anger management skills. While this challenging process is not a panacea for everyone — people with certain disorders can be at risk of permanent psychosis and other damage, for example — it is already helping in the treatment of a variety of mental conditions, as ongoing trial studies and anecdotal evidence show.
The corporate approach to the psychedelic space also poses questions for how to address the legacy of marginalizing, suppressing and persecuting Indigenous peoples and practices, including those pertaining to psychedelics.
One infamous story offers a cautionary tale about the bull in a china shop. It is that of Maria Sabina, the revered turn-of-the-century Mazatec medicine woman — or, as locals say, “curandera” — who hailed from the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Sabina believed that those who sought the divine wisdom of the mushrooms she considered to be sacred — fungi with psychotropic effects that she called the “ninos santos,” or the “little saints” — had to live in full integrity, for, as far as she was concerned, there was “no remedy for being a liar.” So when Gordon Wasson, an American hobbyist and amateur ethnomycologist — one who studies how humans use fungi — came to her in 1955, there was no fixing his deceptiveness. Wasson told Sabina he sought healing (it is widely believed that he feigned illness, knowing she would not administer the mushrooms otherwise) and convinced her to allow his crew to film the process. He underplayed the fact that he was also there to “expose the magic” of her rituals for a feature to be published in Life magazine.
Uninformed about the dire consequences that such an expose might visit upon her and her community, Sabina allowed Wasson to partake in the ceremony. Wasson’s 1957 article, perhaps unexpectedly, ignited a global fascination with psychedelics that drew waves of outsiders to Sabina’s remote village. The previously secluded healing practice was thrust into the global spotlight, and the village quickly became a tourist destination for outsiders — scientists, anthropologists and thrill-seeking hippies — all eager to experience the mystical properties of the psilocybin mushrooms firsthand. The local authorities and villagers blamed Sabina for the wave of foreigners descending upon Huautla, Oaxaca, and disrupting daily life there. Sabina’s home was eventually burned down, and she was ostracized from her community. She spent the latter part of her life in relative poverty and alienation, lamenting how “from the moment the foreigners arrived, the Holy Children lost their purity. They lost their force; they ruined them.”
This dynamic of ill-informed — albeit sometimes well-meaning — attention on communities from outsiders continues to unfold to this day, to the detriment of everyone involved. The unprecedented upsurge of global interest in these Indigenous medicinal practices has given rise to a chaotic, at times unsafe and exploitative, industry of “shamanism” with no oversight or regulation. In South America, Europe and Asia, new “retreats” sometimes operating underground now offer a menu of psychedelic experiences, sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars per week. During a recent trip to Peru, where many Westerners seek (and offer) Indigenous psychotropic medicines, New Lines found an overwhelming array of such services advertised on flyers distributed in public spaces or in private chat groups. Del Rio laments that he is often approached by enthusiastic Westerners who believe they can become qualified to professionally serve ayahuasca after just a few months or weeks of experience, something unthinkable in the Indigenous tradition, which demands years or decades of experience before being entrusted as the community’s shaman. A naive seeker of these services will find it is nearly impossible to discern the safe and experienced medicine facilitator from the fraudster who can cause real harm.
The discord between modern and Indigenous worldviews and respective approaches to healing also has a gendered dimension. Across the Amazon basin, for instance, Indigenous nations such as the Yawanawa and Shipibo have long celebrated psychedelics like ayahuasca as a core component of their spiritual and communal practices. For these cultures, ayahuasca is not merely a medicine — it is a conduit for ancestral knowledge, a way to communicate with the divine and a tool for navigating both individual and collective healing. The brew, known as “nixi pae” to the Yawanawa, is traditionally prepared and administered by medicine women, whose deep connection to the plant and the Earth infuses the ceremonies with what is perceived as a uniquely feminine wisdom.
In these systems of knowledge, Indigenous women like Sabina and the ayahuasqueras of the Amazon are not just healers; they are also protectors of consciousness, the sacred guardians of knowledge passed down through generations. This role has placed them squarely in the crosshairs of patriarchal forces for centuries. When the conquistadors arrived in the Americas, they viewed the practices of Indigenous women — particularly the use of plant medicines and midwifery — as dangerous forms of resistance. Colonial narratives painted these women as witches, their spiritual practices as heretical. The colonial powers understood that control over the feminine aspect of nature meant control over creation itself — over birth, death and the cycle of life — and they coveted all of that for themselves.
The Franciscan Bishop Diego de Landa wrote in the mid-16th century, upon returning from Mexico to his native Spain, about the influence of Indigenous healers, viewed by their Christian conquerors with suspicion. “The sorcerers and physicians cured by means of bleeding at the part afflicted, casting lots for divination in their work, and other matters,” he wrote in his book “Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan.”
Similarly, the Spanish priest Bartolome de Las Casas, though a defender of Indigenous rights in many ways, described encounters with Indigenous women healers in ominous terms. He noted that these women had “sway over the tribes” through their wisdom and “dangerous practices,” referring to the power they held as leaders and healers, which the Spanish viewed as contrary to the Christian faith and colonial order.
Indeed, records from the Inquisition in Lima, Peru detail numerous cases where Indigenous women were persecuted for “witchcraft” and “heresy.” These women were often midwives or healers who used local plant medicines. One case described a woman accused of “conjuring the spirits of the forest” to aid in childbirth, an act the Inquisition framed as malignant use of “diabolical forces.”
In many Indigenous traditions, women used plant medicines not only for spiritual enlightenment but also bodily autonomy. Plants like the peyote cactus or mugwort were believed to help women communicate with their bodies, determining when and whether they wished to conceive. This intimate relationship between Indigenous women and the plants was a form of sovereignty, a quiet rebellion against the forces that sought to control their fertility, sexuality and, ultimately, their power. Silvia Federici, an Italian-American historian, feminist theorist and author of “Caliban and the Witch,” captures this sentiment in her writings: “The witch hunts were a systemic attempt to erase alternative healing practices and women’s knowledge of herbs and medicine.”
In the Shipibo tradition of the Amazonian rainforest, women are often the weavers of “icaros” — sacred songs that guide ayahuasca ceremonies. These songs, which anchor participants during the psychotropic state when sung during a ceremony, are believed to be “downloaded” directly from the plant spirits, offering healing, protection and insight. The songs, like the plants themselves, are perceived and practiced as a form of communication between the human and the divine, the conscious and unconscious — the feminine and the masculine archetypes of the self and the collective.
Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, an American psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, writes in her book “Goddesses in Everywoman”:
[T]he individuation journey — the psychological quest for wholeness — ends in the union of opposites; in the inner marriage of “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of the personality that can be symbolized by the image of yin and yang contained within a circle. Said more abstractly and without assigning gender, the journey toward wholeness results in having the ability to be both active and receptive, autonomous and intimate, to work and to love. These are parts of ourselves that we come to know through life experiences, parts that are inherent in all of us. This is the human potential.
For Carl Jung, the exploration of consciousness, including the use of dreams, active imagination and even mystical experiences, is essential to becoming a whole, healthy individual. In Jung’s view, the unconscious is a realm of mystery and potential, a place where beauty and the unknown converge. As he acknowledged, the unconscious is feared in modern “rational” society precisely because it is unmeasurable, uncontrollable and ultimately irrational.
And yet Jung’s work reminds us that what is feared often holds the key to our deepest transformation. Jung argued that much of human behavior, thought and emotion is influenced by unconscious forces, and only by bringing these hidden aspects into consciousness can individuals truly know themselves and, through self-knowledge, heal themselves. Whereas ignoring the unconscious can lead to a fragmented, incomplete life, engaging it opens us up to profound personal growth. This process of “individuation,” as he called it, is about integrating the various aspects of the self, including the shadow — the darker, repressed parts of the psyche that lurk in the “underworld.”
True healing requires us to confront our demons before we emerge stronger, wiser and more whole — prudent words to heed as contemporary Western mental health medicine wades into the sacred and complex space of mystery and psychedelia. Otherwise, by attempting to short-circuit the hard work with a pill, we may only be fooling ourselves.
This article was published in the Spring 2025 issue of New Lines‘ print edition.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.