The sun was setting over Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, and a naked 18-year-old was screaming for her father to fuck her. Earlier that afternoon, she had sat in a circle outside a rented country house, where about 20 people had gathered for a weekend of “healing” and hallucinogens. The underground retreat, advertised online, promised spiritual awakening.
The night before, the group had drunk ayahuasca, the ancient Amazonian plant brew increasingly marketed as a cure for trauma, depression, and addiction. The next day brought yopo, another powerful hallucinogen from Latin America. The substance, a snuff made from the seeds of the Anadenanthera tree, was administered by having smoke blown up each participant’s nose.
“When you do that,” one participant, who we’ll call Jane, recalls, “it takes people from zero to a hundred in a flick of a switch.”
Jane says she realised something was wrong almost immediately. A man in his sixties began convulsing, screaming for his mother, and violently smashing his head against the wall.
The young woman was next. She also began to scream and shake, and in a panic, stripped off her clothes. In her naked delirium, she was restrained and taken to a room upstairs in the house. “The next day,” says Jane, “she looked like somebody had taken her soul out of her body.”
Ayahuasca is an ancient drug from the jungles of the Andean region. For thousands of years, the strong psychedelic has been made by boiling the leaves of the psychotria viridis shrub, which contain a hallucinogen called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), with the stems of banisteriopsis caapi vines, which make it possible to consume and process.
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