Is Ayahuasca The Modern Lobotomy?

I get it. We all want a short-cut to spiritual transcendence, or at least a life-hack; something that promises to get us there. But the price you pay for poking around your brain chemistry could be more than you bargained for.

Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic drug derived from two different psychoactive plants—Banisteriopsis caapi (the vine) and Psychotria viridis (the leaves). They’re then brewed into a beverage and consumed. The leaves contain the psychedelic compound DMT, and the vines are MAO inhibitors which block enzymes in the stomach that normally break down DMT, ensuring the psychedelic effects don’t get discarded during digestion. It's traditionally been used by Amazon tribes for spiritual and religious purposes, and in healing ceremonies to diagnose illness or talk to the spirit world. The brew of ayahuasca, referred to as "Mother Aya," is referred to as its own sort of presence: the drug is viewed as a teacher that reveals itself in your psyche. 

Modern uses of the drug usually revolve around some kind of psychic healing for mental health issues or to remedy a feeling of spiritual longing. People often seek out shamans who will administer and act as guides for the ayahuasca ceremony because they're seeking spiritual guidance, to radically transform their understanding of the world, or to heal from traumas. And according to the mythology, it works. Ayahuasca is portrayed almost universally as a positive, transformative substance that “opens your third eye.” 

People report radical self actualization, alleviation of past traumas, integration of dormant personality traits, overcoming their demons, becoming more content, less neurotic, more self aware, and spiritually enlightened. It's believed to have antidepressant properties that can help alleviate treatment resistant depression and anxiety. It’s also reportedly used to help treat addiction to substances like alcohol, heroin, and cocaine. 

Ayahuasca is portrayed almost universally as a positive, transformative substance that “opens your third eye.” 

Much like other psychedelic drugs—like mushrooms and LSD—the immersive experience produces an altered state of consciousness that lasts for hours. Most trips last between four to six hours, but if you’ve consumed a particularly strong brew or consumed multiple cups, it can last for up to eight. Ayahuasca is described as a “purgative” medicine, meaning that it purges you in every physical, emotional, and spiritual sense. It induces vomiting, diarrhea, releases repressed emotions, old traumas, and some people report seeing dark entities or energies leave their body. This is why it’s considered to be an incredibly cleansing experience—brutal, emotionally turbulent, perhaps even traumatic, but a release of old burdens.

Some people find the experience so profoundly transformative that they describe it as (an ego) death and rebirth. The release of bodily fluids out of both ends is so ingrained in the process that you can expect to be provided with one or more buckets when you take part in these ceremonies for, erm, disposal of your liquidy insides. The vomiting mechanism is caused by its action on the area postrema, a part of the brainstem that controls the urge to throw up. The urge to vomit is also more violent than normal. 

According to James Giordano, professor of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center, "The nature of that kind of vomiting is exceedingly purgative. It's a really deep, neurologically induced deep vomit. You literally feel as if you have vomited everything you've eaten since birth. It's like this mega-hurl." In an interview with VICE, he says the sheer violence of the vomiting makes it feel like you’re puking thoughts, memories, entire lifetimes. Not just lunch. But neurologically? It’s just vomiting. According to Giordano, it seems that way because of the emotional journey simultaneously taking place and the considerable influence of the social context. People are prompted to anticipate purging as a necessary and integral part of the process to cleanse their soul, citing the fact that many believe the vomiting is emotional despite a lack of science behind that reasoning.  

Enlightenment or Structural Disintegration?

Shamans prompt people who participate in ayahuasca ceremonies to believe it is not the ayahuasca that makes them sick, but the negative things that exist in the body that must be purged. The intense, overwhelming, transitory experience makes the need for a guide, known as a shaman or a facilitator, pretty obligatory. They act as your chaperones to help guide you along the journey, ensure you’re safe, and provide some insight about what’s happening to you. However, one has to wonder just how enlightening the experience really is considering its target demo: pretentious woo woo people who have giant holes in their prefrontal cortex. 

There’s a viral meme that floated around on Twitter a couple of years ago from a notoriously elusive account (@LansharkRides) with a dedicated following and a strict vetting process to access his tweets. Despite not making the cut, this particular tweet has made the rounds onto my feed more than once and never ceases to make my sides go into orbit.

“Ayahuasca is insane because it appears to be one of the most legitimately dangerous drugs with the potential to gigafry your brain but is exclusively taken by literal turbonormies who unironically want to like ‘heal internalized racism trauma’ and basically get oneshotted by it” Landshark tweeted on a random morning in 2023. He added, “Literally the most spiritually inept people in existence having their little lib brains rearranged by some Mesoamerican 6D demon who makes them quit their email job, divorce their bf/gf, and become a traveling circus stripper or whatever.”

As funny and absurd as it sounds, no one illustrates this point better than actual Ayahuasca users themselves. Not even in the interest of searching for evidence that such a demographic exists, but out of sheer coincidence, I came across Patient Zero for the sort of sentient-less ‘normie’ Landshark forewarned about. With every word, I was further taken aback, almost shook to my core with laughter. “Is this a bit?” I thought. But to my horror, it wasn’t. The only thing that made it cruelly unfunny was just how serious it was. The young man—seemingly a lost soul turned casualty of ayahyuasca’s brain scrambling potential, said in a YouTube short, "Ayahuasca completely ruined my entire life. It destroyed my business, it destroyed friendships, it left me with $200,000 in debt, considering bankruptcy, and moving back in with my parents. And Ayahuasca is exactly what I needed to let go of a life that was built off of my ego so that I could create a life that was aligned with my heart. Link in bio for more." 

This would have killed on SNL. I did my due diligence to double-check it wasn’t an irony-poisoned bit. I almost hoped that it was, that they successfully played me. But to my horror, their digital footprint, social media history, and devotion to spirituality post-ayahuasca induced brain rot suggested nothing but unfettered earnestness. This made me wonder, how many people are microwaving their brains for the promise of “enlightenment?” Is ayahuasca the modern lobotomy? 

Gambling With Brain Chemistry 

The esoteric associations of ayahuasca with Amazonian tribes and ancient spirituality—its association with transformation, and the clout derived from coming out of a brutal purgatory in the middle of the jungle done under the guidance of some foreign shaman is all incredibly romanticized. It feels to some who are lost like the forbidden fruit that will unlock the secrets to transcendence. It’s posited as a cure-all for all manner of physical, emotional, and spiritual afflictions. Meanwhile, any negative or traumatic aspects of the experience (of which there are plenty) are brushed under the rug due to their evanescence. A little bit of pain today for a forever-lasting breakthrough tomorrow doesn’t sound so bad to the listless, the suffering, and the spiritually starved. But is there really salvation and a higher vibrational living if it’s induced through lobotomy? And is ayahuasca-induced suffering really so temporary and low risk as enthusiasts insist?

One man’s negative experience with ayahuasca was so severe and life-altering, he documented his journey of rehabilitation online. What he described was a life pre-ayahuasca that could be characterized as healthy, mentally stable, and spiritually curious that was upended into a state of severe psychological destabilization after ayahuasca. On his final night of ceremony, he describes a hellish experience: "I unexpectedly spent an entire night with my consciousness outside of my body, projecting into multiple dimensions, encountering entities, endless fields of geometry, and ended up being uncontrollably thrust into some sort of unfathomable collective hell. Visions of turmoil, death, human violence, murder and suicide consumed my mind. It felt like pure chaos and my vision literally turned to total static."

Unfortunately, the day following the ceremony, things only got worse and he went into what he describes as a mental break. “I was in a delirium, hallucinating, my visual perception was static and distorted, my head was ringing with pressure, I became terrified I was about to die. I didn’t know what to do, so I went to the host and asked for help. I shared my fear that I would be stuck like this and was abruptly told there was nothing they could do for me.” This psychological destabilization and visual distortions leading to non stop shaking violently, severely dilated eyes, and uncontrollable crying continued for days and developed into suicidal ideation.

There have been cases of people dying from overdoses and suffering form psychotic episodes.

At every level of contact, he describes a failure of care and precaution on behalf of the facilitators. While he admits they were knowingly operating a federally illegal operation, their insistence that ayahuasca was 100% safe and encouragement that he attend the ceremony and consume the potent hallucinogenic drug despite his previously expressed concerns that his past trauma could make him incompatible with the medicine are representative of the sort of religious relationship they have with the substance. Their reverence and deification of the plant medicine is of a mythological magnitude that isn’t just pseudoscience, it also prevents them from taking any responsibility for harm and possibly long-term damage caused by ayahuasca due to adverse reactions. 

They aren’t trained medical professionals, neuroscientists, or pharmacists. They’re essentially primitive witch doctors playing with “magic.” But just as quickly as they’ll declare you cured with this supposed magic, it can render you permanently broken. Their quasi-religious reverence for the plant medicine turns it into a sacred cow: incapable of doing harm, beyond reproach. When someone breaks down, dissociates, spirals into psychosis, unlocks a serious mental illness, or harms themselves, it's never the facilitator's fault, it's a "necessary purge," or an entity possession or Mother Aya's will or a necessary part of their journey. That’s convenient for them, but incredibly unhelpful for the person in crisis who’s just fried their brain like a scrambled egg and is powerless to regain control, often with very little help from their coveted “guides.”

Ayahuasca falls into that sacred cow sect of drug culture, similar to marijuana, which is insulated from criticism because of its sycophants' insistence that it's "totally harmless" because it's "just a plant, bro." The usual talking points ensue, "it's not addictive, it cured my anxiety, it's been around for thousands of years." Of course, marijuana, the most popularized, legal, and socially acceptable drug of choice, considered to be the poster drug for safe consumption, is likewise, equally dubious. For all its harmlessness, it sure does trigger life-long psychotic disorders at incredibly concerning rates. It’s by far the leading trigger of substance-induced psychosis, accounting for 30-50% of new psychosis cases in London and Amsterdam. It has the highest conversion rate to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, with 47.4% of drug induced episodes of psychosis becoming lifelong psychotic disorders. That’s the banal “safe” drug people casually do every day. Imagine the damage you could do with something as intense and potent as ayahuasca.

The Dark Underbelly of Ayahuasca Tourism: Corruption, Neglect, and Opportunism 

A 2017 report in Men's Journal documenting "The Dark Side of Ayahuasca" found that the ayahuasca tourism boom in Peru has led to a surge of unregulated, predatory, and often dangerously incompetent shamans taking advantage of naive, overzealous westerners. There have been numerous cases of illegitimate or predatory shamans taking advantage of women sexually while under the influence of ayahuasca’s mind-altering effects. DMT is a tryptamine and tryptamines can make people hyper-suggestible which can make you the perfect prey for people who don’t have your best interest at heart.

Others experience extremely traumatic trips, if not drug-induced psychosis which can manifest through a triggered mental illness the individual may have had a predisposition for. It should go without saying that people diagnosed with psychotic disorders like Schizophrenia or Bi Polar disorder should avoid taking this medicine which can be triggering or exacerbate their mental illness. Some lodges reportedly screen patients for such psychotic disorders but some fail to disclose their mental health history honestly, and there will always be others who simply aren’t aware of their genetic risk. 

Speaking of risks, shamans rarely check for pre-existing conditions, prescription drugs (and their potential interactions) despite ayahuasca's known cardiovascular effects and deadly interactions with SSRIs. Not only can ayahuasca be a psychological terror, but it can pose a serious health concern for people with heart conditions or who take certain drugs. They also reported an epidemic of charlatans posing as shamans to target foreigners, according to journalist Roger Rumrriil who's written 25 books on the Amazon region. The lack of oversight on these retreats and shamans, and the boom in opportunists bypassing the traditional years-long apprenticeships in favor of accelerated shaman training has led to people suffering psychotic breaks, self harm, and death under the watch of these supposedly indispensable guides and "harmless" substances.

When you take a drug that plays with your neurobiology, this is always a risk, but the increase in opportunistic apprenticeships that churn out under-trained facilitators means they’ll certainly be ill-equipped to handle extreme adverse reactions. As much as people insist you can’t “overdose” on ayahuasca, it’s more complicated than that. The potent MAOIs in ayahuasca pose an additional risk because they allow the DMT to cross the blood-brain barrier. Drinking ayahuasca itself may not kill you, but it can lead to a psychological overdose that leaves people with dangerous conditions like serotonin syndrome, persistent dissociation, and if you take certain medications or eat certain foods that interact with the drug, you can suffer seizures, cardiac arrest, hypertensive crisis, or death. 

You might have a cool mystical experience, or you might derail the rest of your life.

There have been cases of people dying from overdoses and suffering form psychotic episodes. Even more disturbing, some deaths have been covered up by shamans to avoid the legal and ethical consequences, such as the death of Kyle Joseph Nolan, who died after an ayahuasca session and whose body was secretly buried at the edge of the ceremonial property. The shaman initially pretended he didn't know what happened to Nolan and joined his father on television pleading to find the missing boy before admitting to his death. The shaman was later arrested and convicted of homicide and lying to authorities. He was sentenced to five years in prison. One man turned violent and attacked another man at a spiritual retreat in the Peruvian Amazon after taking ayahuasca and was stabbed to death in self defense.

Some shamans have been known to spike their ayahuasca brews with toé, an extremely toxic deliriant drug in the nightshade family. It’s a naturally occurring hallucinogenic poison that is dangerous to consume for even the most experienced and careful shamans. It's meant to be used in tiny, controlled doses for divination or spiritual warfare, but there have been reports of shamans dosing foreigners with the drug to provide them with a superficially mind blowing experience that ayahuasca customers have come to expect. A more sinister interpretation would be its potential to induce confusion, suggestibility, amnesia, and total reality distortion in its consumers, making them ripe for exploitation.

Final Thoughts

Maybe, just maybe, a drug handed out by cultish pseudoscientists in the jungle, who believe in witchcraft and use it to rearrange your brain chemistry until you break up with the love of your life, drop out of school, and move to Peru, isn’t enlightenment. It’s probably just a scam. Or a psychotic break. As cliche as the advice "just don't do drugs" may have sounded coming from our middle school D.A.R.E. program PSAs, they might've been onto something with that sage advice. Don't let esoteric spirit guides talk you into lobotomizing yourself in a hut. Sure, you might have a cool mystical experience, or you might derail the rest of your life. It's not worth gambling with your neurochemistry.