First Meeting with Ayahuasca Leaves a Big Impression

Preparation and ingestion of chancruna and yagé brew

Substances: Ayahuasca, Psychotria viridis, Banisteriopsis caapi

First Meeting with Ayahuasca Leaves a Big Impression

Having tripped on psilocybe mushrooms at least 25 times and on LSD a few times (these experiences were weak and rather disappointing), I decided to venture into the realm of DMT. Tribes in the Amazon have been using this stuff for thousands of years, so I knew that it had to be pretty safe. I eventually read plenty on the subject, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs' Yage Letters (not very informative, unless you want to know about Burroughs' sexual encounters with young boys) and various Internet sites. The power of this mixture and the part it plays in South American culture interested me all the more, and I finally sent away for the most traditional plant materials-Banisteriopsis Caapi (yagé) and Psychotria Viridis (chacruna).

In the absence of a coffee grinder, which would have been ideal, I pulverized the dried chacruna leaves by hand and shredded the yagé finely with a Swiss army knife. Internet sources were vague on the subject of dosage because specimens vary so widely, but I gathered that 30 grams of each substance would be a moderate, ball-park amount.

We immersed the chacruna and yagé completely in distilled water in separate, non-aluminum pots (aluminum can come off into the brew and contribute to diseases like Alzheimer's). Acidifying the water helps remove the important chemicals, and we decided to use muriatic acid, which is simply diluted hydrochloric acid, from the hardware store to accomplish this. Lemon juice and Vitamin C make straining the liquids difficult. Some say that one should put about 10 drops of the acid in each cup of water to reach a pH of 4.5 - 5. We found that we needed much less. Our pH strips gave us these readings after only half that amount.

We boiled the liquids for an hour, strained the plant material left over with coffee filters, and set the final product in the refrigerator for about 10 or 15 minutes to cool. Cooling the liquid reduces the kinetic energy of the particles and lets sediments fall out of suspension so that you can pour out the good liquid and leave the silt behind. We replaced this leftover silt in the pots with the rest of the leftover plant material, added water and acid, and boiled again for 45 minutes. We then repeated the process a third time with a final 30-minute boil. At this point, the water was not changing color much, signaling that more extraction was unnecessary. Finally, we boiled down each liquid to a volume of about a cup.

Neither one of us knew if we had followed the procedure closely enough or if the plants we had gotten were potent enough for a full-blown trip. But we did know to expect a horrible taste. My friend had a much harder time drinking it than I did. In spite of the descriptions we found on the Internet, both liquids had a similar brownish color that resembled muddy water. I weigh about 200 lbs., compared to his 150 lbs. We divided the liquids unevenly as a result. The Caapi went down first, chased by some orange juice. I had actually prepared myself for a worse taste and was happily surprised. Shortly thereafter, I started feeling a little unbalanced and distracted-high, in a word. My friend told me that he was actually tripping a little, seeing patterns move on the carpeted floor in the room. Neither one of us had expected this. He had smoked a little marijuana beforehand and explained that was feeling a little paranoid from it. He was hesitant to go on with the experiment, but I reminded him how much work we had put into it, not to mention how much money the plants cost. We decided to let him think about it for a while since we had to wait at least thirty minutes for the yagé to kick in fully as an MAOI, anyway.

Thirty minutes later, I drank the vile DMT-containing chacruna. My friend said he wanted to put it off a little longer, so we left for his room for a change of scenery. The expected nausea came on for both of us shortly. The puking actually felt pretty good to me, and when I got back from the bathroom, I found that my friend had purged himself in his own trashcan.

All but one light was turned off as my vision began. The vague patterns on the wall and such did not remind me much of the ones I had seen so many times on mushrooms. They were somehow sharper, more brilliant. My friend was lying on his bed, and I saw his face from underneath, which made it look very strange, almost alien. Little lights flickered in my field of vision. Another friend who had been smoking grass around us the whole night wanted to smoke a cigarette (disgusting), a great opportunity to go on a walk to see a new sculpture our university had just put near the library.

As I walked, my vision was like a flight simulation or something. It was as if my head was not balanced on my shoulders. It bobbed up and down with my gait. The night air invigorated me. We saw the sculpture, a convoluted tree with faces and limbs coming out of it, and afterwards went to the Divinity School courtyard, them smoking cigarettes and me looking up through the leafless tree limbs. Thick cloud coverage and the pink tint of city lights made the sky seem surreal to me. Looking up through the branches, I could sense the three-dimensionality of the whole thing more deeply than usual. All the bifurcating twigs looked like a diagram of neurons in the brain or something.

When we got back, my one friend felt better and decided to go ahead and take the chacruna after all. I had told him that the Cappi was what made people sick and that stopping now would be denying himself the positive part of the trip. He went along, almost gagging the whole time. He made me drink the last dregs. And, contrary to what I had told him, he indeed got sick again in my trashcan.

As we were all about to make a long trek across campus to see a fantastic dragon sculpture covered in mosaics, he suddenly stopped in his tracks and said, "Guys, I can't go walking just yet. I need to lie down or something." We filed backed into his room, and he proceeded to have the deepest vision of his life. My other friend and I chatted as he put the pillow over his head and mumbled incoherently for a while. I could sense that he was having trouble.

After some time, he ordered us to turn off the television. I tried to talk to him, thinking that this would bring him back to reality a bit and reassure him. He notified me that he was about to die. I recognized this as the ever-so-common ego dissolution problem that snags most new trippers. He was losing control, and his survival instinct was clawing to the last bit of individual identity he had left. I also felt a little nervous because I knew I had the responsibility of helping him through it. I assured him of how common this reaction was, and when he told me that he just could not hold everything together anymore, I rejoined, "Well, maybe you should stop trying."

He thought about that quietly for a minute and then gave me five in appreciation for leading him out of his hectic ayahuasca fantasy world. No more than thirty minutes later, we all hoofed it over the dragon statue at the park and even played on the playground equipment. We discussed the fact that almost all our lives were based on more-or-less arbitrary human conventions. I felt as though I needed to teach people how absolutely free they are. We also discussed ego death. I told him what Timothy Leary wrote in Politics of Ecstasy: the cosmos follows a rhythm of pushing and pulling. No human value judgments apply to this cycle. It just is. DMT and other psychedelic force you to merge with the rest of the universe. The individual's "death" is as beautiful and acceptable as his life. Why resist it?

Although my experience was disappointingly weak, my friend's progress and the resolution of some of his basic problems made both him and I very happy. What visions I did get from the DMT seriously impressed me. Mushrooms can debilitate the person who takes enough, but DMT is a more powerful drug in the sense that it reveals or creates things that mushrooms never will at any dosage. I will certainly try ayahuasca again, perhaps with Mimosa Hostilis root bark instead of chacruna. To have a more intense experience, I am not sure if I should increase the MAOI or DMT dosage. Perhaps, I would have gotten more out of it this time if I had given the MAOI more time to work like my friend did. I highly recommend it to any experienced or well-supervised traveler but want to caution anybody who might be reading this that they had better research the subject thoroughly and approach these substances with reverence and maturity.