A Review of Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics

Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics by Ernesto Londoño (Celadon Books,  2024, 320 pages) 

At a recent Harvard Petrie-Flom Center event, Law and Policy of Psychedelic Medicine, author Ayelet Waldman offered a nuanced perspective on microdosing and government policy. I asked her how we could incorporate understandings of Indigenous cosmologies into our practices of understanding psychedelic integration both in clinical and non-clinical settings. She emphasized the importance of agency, arguing that Indigenous peoples who hold these lineages sacred should lead the conversation. In my view, all too often Indigenous populations’ uses of entheogenic plants and the insights of scholarship in anthropology and religious studies are called on to justify their weight within the realms of science, medicine and biotechnology; but, in fact, those understandings can be collaborative cohorts in our future work.

Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics effectively strives towards this multidisciplinary approach. Ernesto Londoño, the former Brazil bureau chief of the New York Times, embarks on a very personal and journalistic investigation on the transformative potentials and hazards of emerging psychedelic practices in Latin America and the United States. His narrative—about these practices in Trippy—is partly driven by having grown up in war-torn Colombia. That place, his family and their times of conflict haunt parts of the book’s story—one of grief, depression and other forms of suffering.

His book is a cautionary and captivating examination of medicinal psychedelic economies backed by scientific, data-driven views of hallucinogens. Londoño shares how the rise of New-Age psychedelia cultures—and groups as diverse as biotech startups to Indigenous populations—are challenging the uses of these substances. Trippy joins a rapidly growing list of literature in the interdisciplinary project known as the Psychedelic Renaissance.

From my perspective as a student who studies the intersections of these cosmovisions and psychedelic practices, Trippy could have more effectively dealt with the recognition and integration of Indigenous worldviews; in over-attending to his psychedelic expeditions, Londoño doesn’t give sufficient substantiating context to the archaic origins and understandings of these cosmologies and how they differ from New Age worldviews; he glosses over some social lifeways and religious expressions, casually eliding important nuances of the way these practices revitalize Indigenous communities.

Londoño’s call to his psychedelic adventure begins while doom-scrolling one night at 4 a.m. He becomes enraptured by the soothing voice of an Argentine healer and psychotherapist Sylvia Polivoy from the Spirit Vine Retreat Center—a facility known as “one of the first ayahuasca retreats catering to foreigners in Latin America.” On the brink of suicide—filled both with hope and skepticism—he impulsively books a flight that compels him into the Amazon rainforest. Ineluctably drawn into what Londoño calls his “twisted ritual,” he drops $2,550 and undergoes a nine-day initiation into the mystical healing powers of ayahuasca—a sludgy, hallucinogenic brew known for inducing gastrointestinal purging and a constellation of “mind-bending shifts.”

After his first plant-guided trip with what one participant called “Mother Ayahuasca,” which lasts over 10 hours, he says, “there was no question in my mind, if this was an actual cult, I definitely wanted in.” In a leap of faith symbolized in the phrase “drink, don’t think,” he continues his desperate search to look for “glimpses of divinity.” But ultimately, Londoño’s text is both an invitation and a warning: readers exploring these substances ought to think before we drink, experimenting with our eyes cautiously wide-open.

His skepticism resurfaces as he meets with self-deifying “enlightened guides,” charlatans who mask their narcissism behind an altruistic facade. With determination, Londoño sets off to find answers about the history and character of these underground movements. He begins to explore the darker side of these spiritual practices—sexual transgressions, weekender healing “bootcamps,” stultifying sleep deprivation sessions, manipulative marketing pitches and astronomical fees for breathwork and yoga aftercare.

Each part of the book’s three sections begins with a short, illustrated contextualizing map. The maps preview Londoño’s upcoming trippy excursions as his research shifts from South America to the Global North. The author indicates that the future of the Psychedelic Renaissance is migrating to the United States. Londoño’s investigations include research by brain scientists, biomedicine experts and pioneering psychiatrists. Trippy also reveals how some experts are monetizing the intersections of biotechnology and drug policy to decriminalize certain psychedelics in facilitated settings.

When the book was published, some of these substances— such as MDMA— were hailed by the FDA as possible “breakthrough therapies.” Despite the agency’s recent rejection of MDMA, the global health field and adventure travel markets continue to commodify and rebrand a “new” science of healing.  I’ve noticed—in a way the author did not intend—that this lacuna repeats a cycle of colonialism and discrimination that marginalizes Indigenous epistemologies.

In spite of these limits, this book is an amazing roadmap into the psychedelic sphere. In part I of Trippy, named “…Brazil, an Unraveling and an Off-Ramp,” Londoño identifies five places in South America where he travels, researches and writes. He recounts his physical and existential ayahuasca “journeys,” which includes unpacking his ancestral trauma through “A Lineage of Unstable Minds.” Here, Londoño uncovers a common disjointed aspect of American life that he revisits in later chapters: feeling “tribeless.” Geographically removed from our genealogies—and entrenched in the rituals of capitalism—denizens of American culture, like Londoño, many seek to assuage their tribe-lessness through some of these psychedelic tourist traps.

In later chapters, Londoño tries to garner knowledge into the origins and religious applications of ethono-genic plant medicine. He explores the lineage of psychedelic practices under the guidance of the Yawanawa tribe and later meets one of his most important informants about psychedelic therapy, a former political prisoner, Alex Polari—a pioneer and advocate of the Santo Daime religious tradition.

“The Wild West of Psychedelic Retreats in Latin America,” Part II, covers “jarring surprises” in Peru and Costa Rica. Londoño confronts some of the social and psychic dangers of hallucinogens including, gender-based violence—specifically, suicides at queer and transgender retreats—New-Age scams and upscale sales of unregulated stem cell therapies. In the chapter titled “The Tripping Buddhist,” Londoño visits the BIPOC-run Lotus Vine Ayahuasca Retreat Center; he rightly raises awareness about the importance of racial diversities in medicinal business leadership. Lotus Vine claims to blend “ancient” shamanic practices with Buddhist teachings; nonetheless, Londoño declares the “red flags were there from the start.” He astutely notes that “healing marathons sell” and “dreams aren’t cheap.” Londoño effectively recognizes the “ancient” devices are poorly explained and at Lotus Vine, the facilitator—named Spring—is “jarringly improvisational”: overnight, her Shipibo healers became dispensable. She suddenly shifted to employing teachings whimsically infused with the wisdom of abolitionist Harriet Tubman (the subject for her new book).

I appreciated how later in this chapter Londoño shows that shamanism involves both healing and protection from negative influences and supernatural powers. Despite the controversy surrounding word “sorcery,” he contrasts these ideas about shamanism to what Spring is doing, underlining the commitment Indigenous tribes like the Yawanawa have for these practices. Beyond the intensity of the plants and rituals, Londoño also revisits an important point from Part I: the healing power of finding one’s tribe. He explains these retreats are deeply healing because they involve taking on the burden of others, providing accompaniment and care, which explains in part, their widespread popularity.

Yet, despite his personal breakthroughs, Londoño remains troubled by the corruption within these spaces. He paints a much richer picture in which individual greed, the legalities of the industry and psychoactive drugs interact in unique ways to create the perfect storm, leaving many users damaged financially and emotionally.

The narrative turns hopeful and more scientific in Part III, “In Churches, Clinics, Americans Turn to Psychedelics to Heal,” which takes place entirely in the United States, signaling the northern movement of psychedelic experimentation and Londoño’s own quasi-missionary hopes on behalf of medical psychedelics. He persuasively demonstrates that psychedelic churches and ketamine clinics effectively treat the profound suffering of veterans and others—and they do so even as legal battles are fought and sometimes won on behalf of trained practitioners. Londoño achieves his objective here: he balances enthusiasm with practical expectations. Londoño’s aim is to temper the hype surrounding these substances. His efforts offer a clearer view of what treatments can actually achieve. Although Londoño found relief from his depression, psychoactives are not a complete remedy. Active personal involvement in the healing process, alongside psychedelic treatments remain essential.

Londoño approaches psychedelics with a reporter’s sensitivity—an eye for details and concern for others who, like him, are all at wit’s end. Trippy is often open minded (especially given the emerging medical and cultural world he is navigating). Nonetheless, he sometimes sacrifices depth for breadth and does not “get to the bones” in at least two important areas—the vulnerability of women in psychedelic retreats and the sacred and profane meanings of Indigenous lifeways.

In chapter three, “A Rape in the Rainforest,” Londoño highlights sexual crimes committed by a Peruvian shaman and documents the emotional responses of those affected. He shares Dr. Daniela Peluso’s research on gender-based violence in the Amazon. Londoño focuses on a few passages about defensive strategies for preventing assault—i.e., women should “avoid smiling directly at men…traveling alone.” His key insights are meant to draw on the cultural threats that both foreign women and Indigenous women face. While Peluso’s research does focus on cultural differences at ayahuasca centers, her commitment to activism and sexual assault prevention deserves more emphasis. At the Chacruna Institute, she furthered scholarship on data-driven safety and country-specific legal resources for both Indigenous and foreign victims. Peluso reminds us that as Indigenous healing practices become commodified, some rituals operate under [as] a modern-day imperialism for the soul, gender-based violence and exploitation rooted in colonial practices.

Londoño’s project, when carried forth by other writers in the future, can be strengthened by the decades of research and insights about transcendent experiences in the field of religious studies—Indigenous sacred traditions in Latin America and especially in shamanism worldwide. This is true when we read, throughout Trippy, references to the “Holy Ayahuasca,” “Sacraments,” “My Divine Lord,” “Miracles,” “spiritual practice,” “light that shines in all the Universe,” and “my heartfelt prayer.” Londoño has only chapter approaching the profound religiosity of Indigenous traditions: “The Yawanawa: The Tribe that Sprang Back from The Brink of Extinction,” which is a tentative investigation of storytelling and plant usage by neoshamanism. Londoño misses a key insight from his interlocutor, Pai Nai, a medicine man who answers his question about how long psychedelics have been used among rainforest peoples. Nai’s answer is from “time immemorial”—a concept denoting ancient timelessness, i.e. a sacred time before historical time, a concept shared by tribal peoples through the Americas. New Age practices and modern interpretations often fail to grasp the cosmological conviction that spiritual trips—whether stimulated by drumming, dancing or psychedelics—enable the seeker, with the accompaniment of the shaman, to sabotage the suffering of human history. These practices are a re-entering into a primordial epoch, a time when these plants were first introduced to humankind after the creation of the world.

We never learn from Londoño that several generations of scholars—often informed by Indigenous practitioners and especially field work in Colombia since the 1970’s—taught students, writers and readers that psychedelic practices revealed elaborate cosmologies: metaphysical systems as well as maps for magical flights into the sky and underworld where spiritual allies and enemies were negotiated with. A key example is Gerardo Reichel Dolmatoff’s ground-breaking work Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians and The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among Indians in Colombia. Although Londoño makes no reference to this insightful and well-known research—and its derivatives—this chapter exerts informed and significant influence.

Seen in the light of religious studies approaches about hero’s journeys, shamanic journeys and wounded healers, Trippy is, in part, a conversion story about a grieving Latin American Catholic who transforms in part into a more grounded and informed ayahuasca practitioner. He travels back from his point of creation, to Colombia, to mend his soul, attempting to find a tribe and love. Psychedelics gave him “a granular understanding of the anatomy of my depression…a roadmap out of darkness…a value in spiritual practice…glimpse of divinity…a believer in prayer…a certain peace if not quite miracles.” Research bears out these assertions: indeed, studies at John Hopkins have now shown that individuals who had once been atheists reported having some belief in a higher power after being administered the substance N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).

Londoño’s account can be read, in part, as a “revitalization movement,” with doses of psychedelics helping to assuage personal, social and even ecological grief. He reports of the hope for revitalization in the chapter “Holy Ayahuasca,” when Alex Polari—the spiritual father of the Santo Daime religious community—tells him of an apocalyptic need for a world-wide boom of ayahuasca practices. Polari insists that as we are suffering, “from the social problems, environmental degradation, runway capitalism. [..] sacred plant medicine may be able to help us. If there is an off-ramp, it will require changing humanity [..] on a massive scale. We’re in a race against time. [..] plants, especially ayahuasca, might be the only shortcut to reach the expansion of consciousness required for change.”

For Polari, ayahuasca has the power to change human consciousness and suffering on a global scale in part because it is a religious sacrament. Londoño writes late in the book, “With proper safeguards, psychoactive compounds have the potential to reduce suffering on a large scale.” He yearns for a global movement of spiritual awakening and healing through psychedelics. Although the potential for widespread spiritual awakening through psychedelic usage is profound, Londoño warns of the perils caused by the scale and speed at which it is unfolding. If balanced and inclusive knowledge is not applied consistently to our psychedelic future, thwarted by gluttonous monetary interests, pharmaceutical giants and the leadership of poorly informed guides, we wonder if this is the awakening we can truly envision, or the one that could ever come to pass.

Kristen Symbula is a Research Associate for the Mesoamerican Archive, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.