Jesse's Interview with Dennis McKenna, Ethnopharmacologist

JB: How was your recent journey in Peru?

DM: It was very good, as most of them are. We had two back-to-back retreats in July. Two different groups — one of them about fifteen people, the other one about eleven. The general sequence is, at least so far, always the same. We do three ceremonies at a ten day retreat. The first two or three days we just play tourism basically. Everybody gets to Cuzco and we play tourist for a few days and look at some of the major sites. But it's really important for group dynamics — for friendship, so that by the time you get ready to do the ceremony, everybody is friends, everybody is bonded, and you're ready to go through this very intense experience.

JB: What are you most excited to talk about right now? The McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy?

DM: Yes, the Academy. It's connected to all the things I'm passionate about. I want to work with sacred medicines in South America and create a place where people can come to explore ideas. I've tried to start businesses around this, but they failed—I'm not a businessperson. Eventually, I realized I'm an academic at heart. What excites me is the idea of a learning space like the Academy where plant medicines can be integrated into the curriculum.

I call the Academy a "catalytic nexus for the transformation of global consciousness." It sounds bold, but it's necessary if we are to wake up to the global crisis we're facing. Many people are in denial about the urgency of the environmental issues around us. It's no longer possible to ignore—the hottest summers, the most violent hurricanes—it's all happening. Plant medicines seem to play a critical role in this awakening process. People who use psychedelics often come away with the understanding that we need to change radically and fast.

The Academy would bring people together to collaborate on solutions, and I think South America is the best place for it. The plant medicine traditions are rooted there, and the legal frameworks are much more flexible. In Peru, for example, ayahuasca is recognized as part of the national heritage. It would be much harder to create a place like this in a conventional university setting due to regulations. I envision the Academy as the first psychedelic mystery school since Eleusis, where plant medicines are central to the curriculum.

The message that comes through psychedelic experiences is that we are not in control of the biosphere. We're destabilizing it, and we need to find ways to collaborate with nature. These plants, in many ways, are the messengers, telling us to wake up. The Academy will help facilitate that message by offering retreats and creating a space where people can heal themselves, whether from PTSD, depression, or addiction—or simply improve their lives.

Beyond retreats, I want the Academy to hold high-profile events with speakers like Michael Pollan or Graham Hancock, bringing attention to global issues. There's also an academic side to it. With Wade Davis' help, we might be able to get accreditation for programs in ethnopharmacology, blending classroom work with fieldwork in South America. There isn't a world-class ethnopharmacology program right now, and I think the Academy can fill that gap. It's crucial because plant knowledge is disappearing, and so are the plants themselves.

The rainforest is worth so much more if we preserve it. Economically, it's a treasure trove of undiscovered pharmaceuticals. Michael Balick estimated in 1995 that there were 330 blockbuster drugs waiting to be discovered in the Amazon, each worth billions. Beyond the economic value, the rainforest is vital for global climate stability. Preserving it and its biodiversity is not just an environmental necessity but a smart, sustainable economic choice.

I envision governments, corporations, and NGOs collaborating to protect large areas of the rainforest. We could allow bioprospecting without depleting resources. Some compounds can be synthesized, others may require sustainable harvesting. The goal is to preserve this molecular biodiversity, which is invaluable, while benefiting from its discoveries in ethical ways.

JB: What you're saying about how the psychedelic plants and fungi teach about the real value of nature seems very much related to what your brother Terence said about the poetic aspect of consciousness and how it gives rise to ecological awareness.

DM: Yes, I guess poetic is a good term for it. Yeah.

JB: It seems like he was onto something about how poetic novelty actually creates meaningful language in the first place–

DM: Right.

JB: –then over time language becomes habitual. Everyday language is "fossil poetry", as Emerson called it.

DM: Mhmm.

JB: Terence seemed to be suggesting that to keep language alive, we need poetic insight to keep it from becoming entirely habitual. It seems like ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology are perfect examples of that nexus between culture and nature, or habit and novelty—

DM: Yeah … Yeah!

JB: —where meaning itself is synthesized?

DM: Definitely. Yeah. And that's the nexus where the change takes place. The corporate capitalist western model is that nature is not intelligent; at base that it's not intelligent — that it's just a bunch of resources for us to discover and exploit. We're seeing the consequences of that model, and right now we're paying the price because we never really understood our proper relationship with nature. That's something indigenous people have always understood, but we have forgotten it and we have to relearn it.

We want to live in partnership with nature and so we have to find ways to nurture it and use it without destroying it. I think that the psychedelics and especially ayahuasca and mushrooms are like catalysts for that understanding. The idea of the Academy is really that it can become a nexus for this kind of learning. Everyone who comes there takes their ideas and goes out and proliferates it to their friends, and so it's like mycelium, you know — pretty soon these things are popping up all over the place. The first one might be the McKenna Academy, in the Sacred Valley, but eventually there might be these kinds of mystery schools everywhere, or at least in medicine-friendly countries. I think a lot of countries are going to become medicine-friendly. It seems to be happening. The western world would have been much different if Christianity had not suppressed these mystery schools. They were nature based, they were matriarchal, they did not deny the fundamental nature of biology; they celebrated it. What does Christianity hate most? What do they most want to suppress? Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. These things are fundamental to life! So what's with that? It should be celebrated.

JB: After the 1960's, it seems our society just put psychedelics away and tried to forget about them. What about now?

DM: That's right. However, what's different now is that we've had over forty, closer to fifty years to kind of sort this out. When the psychedelics emerged into the western world in the 60s, the major catalyst was Timothy Leary, which in some ways was unfortunate but if it hadn't been him it would've been somebody else. We had no cultural context for psychedelics. This LSD burst into the scene like a bomb going off. Society was not prepared to deal with this. And then, as for Tim, I don't think he set out to become a demagogue of psychedelics, but there's a certain personality that maybe he had that started sort of pushing him in that direction and before he knew it he was riding the tiger and he didn't really know how to get off it. I think he started out as a fairly serious scientist and ended up being what he is known for. Of course, even in the cultural context of that era, the media always jumps on everything and distorts everything. What's different now is a few things. We have matured as a society. Psychedelics have been around for fifty years as part of the society, though of course they've been around thousands of years in indigenous societies. We've woken up to the fact that there is a long indigenous tradition of the use of these things, and those societies have done just fine. They're not a threat. So we can learn from them, and we can appreciate this pre-historical and non-historical context in which psychedelics have always existed. We can learn from that how to incorporate them. You know, we have to invent our own traditions. We can't whole-hog adopt these shamanic practices. Plenty of people try to do that. I think that's misunderstanding. I can't become Yanomami, or Witoto. That's not what we want to do, but we can learn from them how to use them in the context of their own society, and that's happened. There are a lot of people who know a lot about psychedelics and I think it has created a situation where we can have conversations about it that don't immediately degenerate into hysteria and false assumptions and accusations and all that. We can look at it a little more objectively. People are just a little more chill about it than they were before, and a lot of that, I think, is because the people of my age who were part of the counterculture, or at least grew up in that time, are now professors and administrators, and they're kind of higher up the hierarchy now. They're not so afraid of these things. And then you combine that with the fact that there's good science emerging about the benefits of these things; so we can have a much more nuanced conversation rather than, 'Oh god these things are bad and they're going to drive you crazy and make you jump off buildings'. I mean we're way past that part.

So what I want to do with the Academy is have it be a training ground in a certain way, a place where people from many walks of life can come, learn how to use these things professionally and effectively. The obvious application is therapies, and we'd like to have programs specifically for therapists. I'd also like to have events that explore, say, psychedelics as problem solving tools; get the top ten cosmologists in the world to come and take ayahuasca and mix it up and share their ideas and that sort of thing.

JB: How can people keep up with what's happening with the Academy?

DM: The website is up at www.McKenna.Academy. People can sign up for the email mailing list there.

JB: Do you think that the message from the plants that you've shared, "you monkeys aren't running things", is hard for people to digest?

DM: Well yeah, because we're control freaks. But I think it's something we have to wake up to, that we're not running the thing. And if we are running it, we're doing a piss-poor job. We're totally mismanaging.

But we can't run it. Nature is demonstrating this to us every day now, how little control we do have, and how we've got to change things. First, you have to create a consensus that there needs to be a change. We're not even there yet. Unfortunately, the people with the political power and the corporate power don't even want to hear about it. They deny that there is any kind of problem. This is very dismaying. What's it going to take for people to realize what's happening? And you know, we don't have the luxury of thirty years anymore. It used to be that people would say we have thirty years to figure this out. Maybe we have ten years.

JB: That's a hard thing to comprehend. It would take a lot of ecological understanding to try to predict these things, right? The average person doesn't have that, so it just breaks down into tribal arguments about climate change and humanity's role, or lack of role in it.

JB: That's a hard thing to comprehend. It would take a lot of ecological understanding to try to predict these things, right? The average person doesn't have that, so it just breaks down into tribal arguments about climate change and humanity's role, or lack of role in it.

Yes and, sure, there's always going to be fluctuations in climate, weather, and this sort of thing, but if you look at long term trends, which we've been tracking long enough, we know just by looking at the carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere. We passed the critical threshold a couple of years ago. Now what are we up to? 540 parts per million. That's higher than has ever existed in the history of life on Earth. In terms of our carbon emissions–I don't know how accurate this is, but I saw something recently that said volcanoes are one of the biggest contributors of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Our output is now sixty times what volcanoes put into the atmosphere. This is way out of whack. The plants, because they fix carbon, are trying to keep up, but there's only so much elasticity in that system. That's my concern. The biosphere, nature, is based on homeostasis and equilibrium. These positive and negative feedback loops are what tend to keep things in balance, but at a certain point you reach a tipping point. You push the envelope so much that the envelope snaps. You can't reestablish balance. Then you get these positive feedback loops that are reinforcing the destabilizing influence. So you can look at the possibility of runaway greenhouse effects and that sort of thing, and we're right on the cusp of that happening. At a certain point we won't be able to stop it. And then what? Then it becomes kind of dire.

JB: That does sound dire. It is encouraging though, to see how many people are showing up at conferences, discussing ecological concerns and consciousness change.

DM: It is encouraging that at least the conversation is on the table. A lot of people are talking about it, so that's encouraging, but at the speed at which politics move and laws move, and all that, it's still much too slow. I mean you just keep plugging, and you hope. You just keep plugging because, what else can you do? But it's hard to see how any legislation, or anything like that that governments might come up with, are going to be adequate; they'll be bandaids, like they've been up until now. There's no global authority that can impose this stuff, although sometimes you kind of wish there was, but you know, the kind of world leaders that would be able to do that are people like Trump, you know, and they have no wisdom. What we lack are wise leaders. We just don't have that. So, leaders are not respected and probably shouldn't be, because they're lame.

JB: I recall a recording in which your brother Terence quoted William Blake: "the truth cannot be told so as to be understood without being believed." This is a hopeful proposition, considering what you're doing with the Academy. An example is what you were saying about carbon emissions and the state of the atmosphere. To understand it you have to already have some understanding of what carbon is, and what photosynthesis is and… you know.

DM: Right. People don't even get that.

JB: Finding a common language is a big challenge.

DM: We need to make a big change.

JB: I've heard it said that we don't grow plants, we create the conditions for them to grow. Do you think that's how it is with cultural change too?

DM: That's right.

JB: That's what it sounds like the Academy will be doing: rather than thinking first of changing the world, thinking first of creating the right conditions for the world to change.

DM: Right, exactly. We become an incubator for the ideas, and then let the ideas flourish, cross-pollinate, and synergize, and just let that happen by having the wisdom to not try to control the process, except insofar as it moves it forward. So, we'll see.