Author: Paul

Previously: Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru.

I’ve never been a particularly spiritual person. I’ve never been rooted in any particular faith since my early childhood. I had even come to realize that I had little faith in pretty much anything, in the strictest sense of the word. Lengthy depression had left me jaded; I had grown incapable of believing in things based solely on belief. But that same lengthy depression had also left me so tired and worn-down that I was willing to try anything. It was a weird place to be.

On top of that, one of the first requirements of the ayahuasca ceremonies is that my system needed to be clear of any other drugs, and that included the Wellbutrin and Zoloft I was taking at the time. The combination hadn’t been doing me a whole lot of good, my general emotional state was ‘completely disinterested in life.’ Still, that was a lot better than ‘wanting to exit life’ so I wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of going off them. But if I was going to go through with the ceremonies I had no choice, there was a genuine risk to my life if I tried to mix them with the ayahuasca. Three months before the trip I started the slow process of weaning off what I’d been taking, so that six weeks before the ceremony my system would be clear. It was a lousy process and worse once the drugs were gone. By that time I had pretty much severed contact with the outside world and I tried to simply hold on to the idea that what I was doing served some kind of purpose, that as bad as I felt at least this time it was some kind of step towards feeling better.

Sarah and I left for Peru in early December. It’s a six hour flight from Atlanta to Lima that takes you from the Atlantic coast of the US to the Pacific coast of South America, without ever leaving the Eastern Time Zone. It doesn’t seem like that should be right, but trust me, it is. We played trivia on the seat-back video system and I got a question about Mike Viola (who I opened for in Boston a while ago), of all things, and I tried to watch movies and tv shows I don’t actually like. In other words, it’s a long, boring flight especially if you hate flying, and I do, and especially if you’re flying at night, which we were.

We got into Lima at midnight, shambled through customs and out in to the night, taking a taxi to a hotel for literally just the night. It was eight hours until our flight to Iquitos and we’d decided we didn’t want to try and sleep in the empty airport. Both of us had tried to pick up enough Spanish as we could beforehand but, like everyone always says, the gap between studying a language and actually trying to practice it in conversation with native speakers is pretty wide. It made for a surreal experience to start the trip. Our amiable driver spoke better English than we did Spanish (Un poco. Mi Espanol es muy terrible was one of the first phrases I became fluent with), and was happy to practice it with us, so we had a lengthy, halting, multi-lingual conversation about the population of Lima versus Atlanta and why Chinese food is so popular in Peru. We drove along barren-seeming beaches in the dark and through cramped but empty streets that nevertheless included a fire-juggler looking for tips, until we reached the hotel. It was similarly cramped, in a way that suggested it was never built to be a hotel, with a tiny, glass elevator (with a swinging door), paper-thin walls and windows that faced the hallways.

I tried to sleep, but weighed down by the drunken voices reverberating through the building, the six hours in an airplane seat, the three months without meds, the knowledge that I was in a place where I could barely communicate with those around me and the general feeling of having untethered myself from any feeling of security I’d ever had, what little emotional scaffolding I had finally collapsed. Sarah tried to calm me as best she could, as tired and stretched thin as she felt herself, and eventually I fell asleep listening quietly to an old episode of This American Life and hanging my temporary sanity on the solidity of familiar sound.

Next time: Things pick up, I swear.

Everyone wants to know “what happened in Peru?”

Or, more accurately, they wanted to know, back in December when I had just returned. Unfortunately, I turned out to be incapable of writing about it at the time. In fact, it’s only recently that I’ve started to feel as if I have any kind of handle on what happened. So, for the next few days I’m going to try and get back to that particular mindset as best I can and put something together in some reasonable fashion. I may digress and discuss other things that might seem unconnected that will hopefully become more clear as this goes on, though it’s entirely possible they won’t. This might end up being terribly long (in return for which I’ll break it into more manageable bits), though again it’s also possible I might get two paragraphs in and find I have nowhere to go. In which case, well, that’s already one paragraph gone right there.

(Some of you might rightly wonder why I’m talking about Peru in the first place. Severe clinical depression, my friends, better explained HERE.)

The short version is that Peru was amazing. Life-changing. But it’s all still up for grabs as to what it’s changing into.

First, the context: When I was younger, I smoked pot infrequently and usually to little effect. I never developed any kind of taste for alcohol. On the rare occasions I drank I did it at parties in order to get drunk, and since I grew up shy and introverted I didn’t go to a lot of parties. I also did LSD four times, the most recent being roughly twenty years ago. That’s pretty much a full accounting of the illicit substances I’ve ingested in my life. Of those, only LSD made any kind of impact on my worldview. It didn’t shatter worlds, but it did make their foundations shaky. I knew after the first time I tried it that I had become a different person, or at least now saw the world in a different way. I still think that everyone should try it at least once, I mean, accept or reject what it shows you, but at least look. But, hey, that’s me, and anyway that isn’t the point of writing this.

No, the point is that I’ve tried illegal drugs, found worth in some, less in others. None of them developed into anything anyone could reasonably call a ‘habit.’

More context: I’ve seen various doctors, psychiatrists and therapists to help deal with the severe depression I’ve battled over the past fifteen years or so. This depression, it seems to me, is largely situational and self-inflicted. It stems from certain behaviors and choices and their accompanying guilt and regret, and was exacerbated by a powerful ability to look the other way and convince myself that the cause and effect were unrelated. The particulars are important personally, but they don’t have anything to do with the point of writing this.

No, the point is I’ve also tried a good number of legal drugs, found worth in some, less in others. Certainly, the amount of Prozac, Wellbutrin, Celexa, Effexor, etc. that has been pumped into my system over the last fifteen years is far in excess of the more illegal psychoactive drugs I experimented with in my early twenties. None of them provided any positive results that anyone could reasonably call ‘permanent.’

So, that’s the landscape that more or less existed last November when I wrote that I was going to Peru to take ayahuasca. At the time I didn’t bother to explain what ayahuasca was because, you know, I assume everyone knows everything I do. “Ayahuasca” is a psychoactive brew made from the ayahuasca vine and chacruna leaves, that’s been used by indigenous Amazonian cultures as a religious sacrament and healing medicine for thousands of years.

“Chacruna leaves contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen that’s orally inactive. But it’s dissolved in the stomach [by] monoamine oxydase. They mix chacruna leaves with ayahuasca, which contains several substances that inhibit the stomach enzyme. By cooking the two plants together for hours, it produces a drink that contains orally active DMT and the molecule is absorbed through the stomach intact and goes to the brain. How could they have discovered this recipe when we know there are 80,000 species of evolved plants in the Amazon? Any given combination would give only a one in six billion chance of finding it.”
– Jeremy Narby, anthropologist

DMT also happens to be a Schedule I drug, which creates the odd situation in the US where it would be legal to grow ayahuasca and chacruna but illegal to mix and ingest them.

My first serious exposure to the drug was stumbling onto an article in National Geographic, by a writer who suffered from meds-resistant depression, who had read some of the scientific studies involving the use of psychedelics in treating depression (ayahuasca in particular), and decided to travel to Peru to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony. Her experiences (the article was written during a return visit) struck a chord with me and, when eventually my own situation deteriorated to the point where electro-convulsive therapy was being suggested, I decided I had nothing to lose in trying something seemingly crazy.

Next time: I leave and arrive.