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Now you you spent some time Studying ayahuasca. Yes, and that’s kind of an interesting story So maybe you could tell everybody who’s watching and listening how ayahuasca is prepared and also how unlikely it was that that Preparation method was discovered and I’d like to know if you have any more insight into how in the world that ever came about Yes, yes Yes to both. I So I did my PhD research at the University of British Columbia was basically about ayahuasca about looking at the chemistry pharmacology botanical sources traditional uses of ayahuasca Another aspect of my thesis research was kind of a comparison of ayahuasca with another much more obscure Amazonian Psychedelic called uku hey Which is Comes from entirely different botanical sources But like ayahuasca it is also an orally active form of Dimethyltryptamine and that’s the key to this DMT is a short acting psychedelic, but it’s not Orally acting by itself if you consume DMT if you drink a tea That contains DMT or you know, just eat DMT or whatever It’s not active because there are enzymes in the gut monoamine oxidases that will inactivate DMT Before it’s ever absorbed in the active form what indigenous people Have done when they prepare ayahuasca they combine it with another plant that contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors this class of Compounds called beta carbolanes very potent very selective MAO inhibitors. So if you make a beverage a drink or decoction is really the technical term with a plant that contains DMT and a plank that contains these beta carbolanes then it becomes orally active and instead of a 10 to 20 minute experience, which is what you get when you smoke DMT or vape DMT they do that now these days or Injected even you get about 20 to 30 minutes of an experience But in the oral form it stretches it out to six or seven hours So it’s a very different experience. It’s not as intense But in some way it’s deeper. It’s more profound because the thing with taking DMT by a Perendural route other than through the gut It is profound. It’s very intense. It’s also so fast that by the time you’re You know by the time you’re just beginning to sort of get to the place it’s already fading You know, so you come back with not a lot of Information that kind of a sense of astonishment But not a lot of hard data So the idea of ayahuasca is you get to spend more time in that place In that altered state and there’s a chance to learn more now How did this come about the question always comes up? How did these? indigenous people Figure out this combination one plant containing beta carbolanes of another containing DMT out of the 80,000 or so species in the Amazon. How did they stumble on? this one combination was a trial and error or How if you talk to the people? They will say Well, the plants told us You know, but to a Western scientist this doesn’t make a lot of sense, you know the plants the plants told you What are you talking about? You know Actually, I think the real story is a little more prosaic in a sense that in in our ESPD 50 conference we had a anthropologist dr. Manolo Torres who presented on this and The fact is that at a certain point Maybe a Thousand years ago possibly a little earlier than that. There was a very active there were different cultures that were living Sort of in proximity to each other in the region where? Colombia Venezuela Peru now come together these cultures were very Experimentally oriented toward plants they had shamanic traditions and They used They were also very active in making chicha. They were essentially beer Producers they distilled or they didn’t distill them But they had different fermented beverages prepared from fruits and grains and things like that and They had many different kind of chicha mostly prepared from manioc and they were also experimentalists they were like they were like Craft brewers today sort of you know craft brewers will they have their beer? But then they’ll just reach for anything on the shelf or an ingredient will come up and they’ll say oh, let’s make it Let’s make a craft brew with With kava and under with some other some other plant. Let’s make something Interesting. Well, the the people making the the chicha had the same sort of curiosity and in in their Medicinal pharmacopoeia they had the snuffs, right? That’s the other way in the Amazon that the DMT is used in the form of stuff and they had these snuffs They had these anathenanthro snuffs which are Don’t require MAO inhibitors because you take them, you know as a snuff. They also had Banisteriopsis which is the vine that contains the beta carbolanes. They use that separately as a medicinal plant For various reasons and it has some psychoactivity basically, I Think they stumbled on this formulation You know the plants were in the mix as it were and they stumbled on this Formulation, but it wasn’t wasn’t entirely a Trial and error, you know, it was it was more like an educated guess Not really from the standpoint of biochemistry they didn’t think in terms of Monoamine oxidase inhibition and that sort of thing But they were familiar with the effects of these different plants and they thought well what happens if we mix them? You know and they did They had a spectacular result. I Was talking to Brian Murorescu. I think it’s probably yes in a year ago He wrote the immortality key and you know, he he was although a lawyer he was the book is about ethno pharmacology in many regards and it sounds to me like The account that you’re making of what happened in the Amazon jungle Sounds to me very much like what seemed to happen in ancient Greek culture with their a formulation of various psychedelic wines That’s right So all these different people were just brewing all these different concoctions and experimenting to see what produced the most remarkable effect and and in Greece they seem to have stumbled across something that was perhaps LSD based or essentially LSD based whereas in the Amazon jungle they they came across both DMT and the and the chemical that inhibited its breakdown and So that it’s very interesting to see that that is likely the case in both those disparate cultures