The History of Ayahuasca

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Ayahuasca is difficult to know because of perhaps a lack of artifacts, but at least several hundred years back and very much ingrained in certain cultures in Peru and Brazil. With an LSD, for example, we discovered in the 20th century, right? Yeah, we did. He took that dose of LSD and was shocked at the effects, thought he was dying. But it describes what sounds like quite a nightmarish experience. His neighbor comes around and she turns into a malevolent witch who he thinks poisoned him. And yeah, he thinks he's dying. The 1960s pushedback against psychedelic drugs had very significant implications for psychedelic drug research and medical use leading to essentially an outright ban

The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific research as well. Along with restrictions placed by individual nations, it has been very difficult for scientists to study the effects of psychedelics on the brain, despite indications that they might have significant therapeutic potential. But this has gradually been changing, and researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris have begun to perform controlled experiments to see how psychedelics affect the brain, and what positive uses they might have. Robin and I talk about how psychedelics work, how they can help with conditions from addiction to depression, and how they can help people discover things about themselves.

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Robin Carhart-Harris received his Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Psychedelic Research in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, and holds an honorary position at the University of Oxford. His research involves functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca), plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

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