Was Ayahuasca Used for Political Indoctrination in Brazil?
In 2023, supporters of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro violently stormed the capital in an attempted coup. Among Bolsonaro’s most loyal supporters were leaders in the União do Vegetal, one of Brazil’s oldest and most popular ayahuasca churches. Brazil’s laws state that electoral propaganda is forbidden inside temples and churches but former União do Vegetal members say they experienced what some called brainwashing while in an altered state.
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An Ayahuasca Message
The Noke Koi are an Indigenous group from Acre, Brazil who consider themselves guardians of the psychoactive plant brew ayahuasca, which they call “uni.” This summer, they traveled to the U.S. to spread an urgent message: their home in the Amazon is being destroyed.
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Was it DMT? Or was it heaven?
When a neurosurgeon claimed he glimpsed the afterlife during a coma, skeptics offered a more earthly interpretation – a surge of DMT produced by his own body. Was his tale of eternity a trick of the brain, or a window into something science can’t explain?
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The Psychedelic Playlist
Vivaldi. Bach. The Beatles. The Johns Hopkins playlist has been the standard soundtrack in psychedelic trials at Johns Hopkins and therapy rooms around the world for more than 25 years. It also skews toward Classical and Christian music. When Sughra Ahmed, a Muslim, enrolled in a psilocybin study that used this playlist, she didn’t love what she heard. So where did this playlist come from exactly? And what can science tell us about what role music plays in a trip?
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A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Muslim Leader Get High
Nearly a decade ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University gave some two dozen religious leaders from various faith backgrounds a high dose of psilocybin. Now, the long-awaited results of the study are out. Journalist Michael Pollan, who wrote about the research for The New Yorker, weighs in on whether science can ever truly measure mysticism.
Psychedelics are now at the center of a global conversation about mental health, mysticism, and even how we experience illness and death. In Altered States, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross explores how people are taking these drugs, who has access to them, how they're regulated, who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society.
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