The Psychedelic Century:

The Amazonian Origins of the Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens in the Long Twentieth Century

The “psychedelic renaissance” is upon us. According to a plethora of news reports, best-selling books, television series, and scientific journal articles, psychedelics offer a glimpse of hope for those whose suffering has been unaddressed or neglected by biomedicine; terminal cancer patients have received psilocybin treatment to confront existential distress while those with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been working with MDMA-assisted therapy. Such portraits reinforce a conventional historical narrative: psychedelics were heralded as medical miracles from the late 1950s to the late 1960s before a series of cultural, scientific, and sociopolitical controversies transformed them into social pariahs effectively ending scientific studies of psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and ayahuasca—until now. However, my work shows that the popular and historical narrative of a “psychedelic renaissance” is Western-centric and incomplete. By focusing on the northwestern Amazon, I offer an important corrective to this narrative of drastic change to instead demonstrate a lively and enduring history of psychedelic sciences, one inseparable from the lives and worlds of Amazonian inhabitants.

My dissertation reconstructs the twentieth-century history of ayahuasca, caapí, and yagé—sacred plant-beings—as they became entangled with scientific and biomedical programs in the northwestern Amazon. While I primarily attend to these plants, I pay close attention to their relationship with other sacred plants, such as tobacco, coca, and nightshade flowers, and related non-human beings, such as jaguars and yakumama. In this context, there was no dramatic rise and fall of psychedelic research programs but, rather, an evolving and tumultuous relationship between sacred plants, spiritual practices and religious institutions, the development of biomedical sciences, performances of race and acts of migration, and narcotics regulation. I begin this story with caapí’s encounters with naturalists in the mid-nineteenth century in Brazil and Ecuador, trace yagé as it became important in Colombia for early- and mid-twentieth century ethnobotanists and anthropologists, and follow ayahuasca as it moved into the laboratories of late-twentieth-century Peruvian psychiatrists and Brazilian syncretic churches.

My research has received generous support from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with the Center for Latin American and Latin Studies, the GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation, and the Pepper Graduate Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.