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ESPD55 Symposium: Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs since 1967. Available for free:

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A curandero once told anthropologist Michael Winkelman something he never forgot about the medicine: “It is a liquid, it will fill whatever vessel you create for it.” 🌿

That vessel is ritual. In this Brainforest Café conversation, Dennis McKenna and Dr. Winkelman, author of the new Handbook of Entheogenic Healing, travel through 13 healing traditions, from the Mazatec mushroom velada and Wixárika peyote pilgrimages to San Pedro, Shipibo ayahuasca and the Native American Church.

What they found: the fasting, the songs, the overnight ceremony and the family circle show up again and again. Winkelman argues these aren’t just cultural habits. They’re rooted in our evolved biology, and modern psychedelic medicine is missing half the picture without them.

He also shares his meeting with María Sabina’s circle in 1988, his “illuminated ape” take on human evolution, and why “we’re all indigenous to Earth.” 🍄🌙

🎧 Full episode now on Brainforest Café.

📚 Want to go deeper? Michael Winkelman’s course, Psychedelics and Human Evolution, is waiting for you in the McKenna Academy Living Library.

Tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy

In the Chihuahuan Desert, a small cactus can take up to a decade to reach maturity. In the forests of West-Central Africa, the iboga shrub keeps a similarly slow clock. Both sit at the heart of living traditions, and both now face a surge of global research interest that wild populations were never built to supply.
Making their compounds by petrochemical synthesis isn't a clean answer either. It brings hazardous industrial waste and, often, restrictive patents.
Prof. Jeffrey Gerst is a molecular geneticist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, whose lab showed that mammalian cells share messenger RNA with one another. In this new course he turns that expertise to a third path: reading the genetic blueprints these organisms already use, then rebuilding those pathways inside baker's yeast and fast-growing plants.
The method is elegant. Compare a cactus that makes a molecule with a close relative that doesn't, and the genes responsible begin to stand out.
The open questions are just as compelling. Can a single isolated molecule ever match the full chemistry of the whole plant? And can biotechnology protect biodiversity while genuinely respecting the cultures that understood these plants first? Dennis McKenna pressed him on exactly that in their Brainforest Café conversation.
Indigenous knowledge found these plants. Science is only now learning how they build their chemistry.

Watch the first lesson free: link in bio
Course: Bioengineering the Psychedelics, with Prof. Jeffrey Gerst

#syntheticbiology #ethnopharmacology #ethnobotany #McKennaAcademy #LivingLibrary by @mckenna.academy

What comes after the psychedelic revolution? 🍄🌿

Tomorrow, Dennis McKenna joins the II Simposio Psiconauta: Navegación & Vanguardia with a virtual talk:

✨ “After the revolution: natural psychedelics and the right to symbiosis” ✨

Hosted by Fundación Lobeliana, a nonprofit that protects, researches and shares knowledge of the planet’s psychoactive plants, animals and fungi, this second edition gathers scientists, academics, independent researchers, self-taught explorers and artists to explore the edges of the known: psychonautics, human consciousness, ecstasy and shamanism, and the role psychoactives have played in the story of humanity.

Where the first edition, “Utopía & Ebriedad”, cast a wide net, “Navegación & Vanguardia” turns toward the experience of navigation itself, and the research proposing new ways to understand the relationship between substances and consciousness.

🗓 Tuesday, October 27
🕔 17:00 Chile · 21:00 CET · 16:00 ET
💻 Online

Tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy

Can a single drop of a plant change everything? 🌿

On the latest Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with Kat Maier, a clinical herbalist with more than 40 years in practice, a physician assistant, and the author of the award-winning Energetic Herbalism.

Inside the conversation:
· Why science and spirit were never really separate
· Learning to read your own “inner landscape”: hot or cold, damp or dry, tense or relaxed
· The case for regional herbalism, using fewer plants and using them wisely
· One drop of Black Cohosh, prepared with prayer and song, that became an hour-long ancestral journey
· The Herbal Mutual Aid Directory, bringing plant medicine to communities in crisis

As one of Kat’s teachers told her: “Our role is to reveal, not to convince.”

A rare blend of clinical rigor and deep reverence for the plants. 🎧

#BrainforestCafe #DennisMcKenna #KatMaier #EnergeticHerbalism #Herbalism #PlantMedicine #Ethnobotany #ClinicalHerbalism #HerbalMutualAid #McKennaAcademy

Tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy

What Dennis McKenna will be sharing at Spirit Plant Medicine Conference this year is "A Symbiotic Revolution: Natural Psychedelics and Symbiotic Rights.

It's the kind of conversation that doesn't usually get room to breathe at most events, but SPMC was built for exactly this. October 23–25 in Vancouver: three days, in person, where Indigenous lineage, plant medicine science, and visionary art meet as one field, not three separate tracks. No livestream — this one's meant to be experienced in the room.

If you've been wanting to go deeper into this work with him, this is the place.

Use code MCKENNA20 for 20% off your ticket: https://spiritplantmedicine.com/home?am_id=dennis1986 by @mckenna.academy

"Remember, you monkeys only think you're running this show."

That was the message Dennis McKenna says ayahuasca gave him in 1993. Three decades later, he has built an entire argument around it.

His starting point is uncomfortable: the psychedelic renaissance has, in the narrow sense, won. PTSD, depression, addiction, end-of-life anxiety, all now seriously studied. And that success has attracted venture capital and what Dennis calls the biomedical-pharmaceutical-industrial complex, moving to own and control medicines that are the common heritage of humanity. His summary of the logic is blunt: what isn't patented is prohibited.

So his answer is to go around it. Take nature back. Not by waiting a decade for a bureaucracy to catch up, but by rediscovering the symbiotic alliances our species has held with plants and fungi since long before agriculture.

Because symbiosis, not competition, is the real engine of complexity. The mitochondria in every one of your cells were once free-living bacteria, absorbed and kept somewhere between 2.6 and 1.6 billion years ago. That single merger is why complex life exists at all.

Read the full Field Guide, link in bio.

Dennis McKenna's talk "A Symbiotic Revolution: Natural Psychedelics and Symbiotic Rights" lives inside the Living Library, where the complete presentation and the downloadable slides are available to members.

#DennisMcKenna #Symbiosis #Ethnopharmacology #Psychedelics #Mycology by @mckenna.academy

Dennis McKenna will be speaking at the Spirit Plant Medicine Conference this October 23–25 in Vancouver, and he wanted you to hear about it directly from him.

SPMC isn't a typical conference. It's a three-day, in-person gathering where Indigenous wisdom, plant medicine science, visionary art, and community come together on one shared stage, with no breakout tracks pulling everyone in different directions and no livestream. Everyone who's there is actually there, together.

This year's gathering also includes Paul Stamets, Dr. Rick Doblin (MAPS), and Indigenous elders including Chief Ira and Janelle McArthur, opening and holding the space.

Dennis will be sharing "A Symbiotic Revolution: Natural Psychedelics and Symbiotic Rights", and he'd love for you to be in the room for it.

Use code for 20% off your ticket: MCKENNA20 — Check the link in our Bio.

Hope to see you there. by @mckenna.academy

Hundreds of tiny, colorfully dressed people climbing the chairs. Jumping into your soup. Falling off the table and obeying gravity. 🍄

This is what people in Yunnan, China describe after eating an undercooked wild bolete mushroom. Stranger still, the same "little people" were reported independently in Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

On the Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with mycologist Colin Domnauer (University of Utah), who used DNA sequencing to identify the species behind the mystery: Lanmaoa asiatica.

They talk about:
🍄 The 1930s reports of "mushroom madness" that puzzled Wasson, Heim and Hofmann
🍄 Market interviews in China, where everyone has a funny story about the little people
🍄 Why one vendor summed it up as "it's poisonous, but it's delicious"
🍄 Lab work hunting for an unknown compound that is clearly not psilocybin
🍄 What Lilliputian hallucinations might reveal about how we perceive reality

Dennis calls it one of the most interesting discoveries in mycology in a very long time.

🎧 The full conversation is out now.

#BrainforestCafe #DennisMcKenna #McKennaAcademy #Mycology #Ethnomycology #Fungi #Mushrooms #Ethnobotany #Consciousness #Perception #Science

tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy

October 10th. St. Andrews, New Brunswick. 🌿

Bridges to Ancestral Wisdom: Listening to Nature's Teachers

Join legendary ethnobotanist Dr. Dennis McKenna and acclaimed filmmaker Greg Hemmings for an immersive evening of documentary film, visionary talks, and live music, all devoted to plant intelligence, Amazonian conservation, and the deep roots of sacred plant medicine.

What awaits you:
🎬 Four film screenings: The Shaman and the Scientist, the Biognosis Project, Rewiring the Muse: Huachuma Episode, and insights from the Coca Summit
🎤 Keynotes by Dennis on the sacred reverence of Coca, the history of Huachuma, and the legacy of the ESPD, from its beginnings to a look ahead at ESPD 60
🎶 Live musical sets by Ryan Leblanc
💬 An open Q&A with Dennis and Greg

📍 Huntsman Aquarium Theatre, St. Andrews, NB
🕡 6:30pm to 10pm

Seats are limited. Tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy

Don't let the title fool you.

The Hippies Were Right! sounds like a fluff piece. Dennis McKenna says it is anything but. Tam Hunt's new book, out since August, is part memoir and part scholarly treatise on one of the most interesting theories of consciousness anyone is working on.

At ten years old, Tam talked his father into letting him stay at a Washington State commune. In his early twenties he carried four hits of acid into Waimea Canyon on Kauai, spent ten hours beside a stream, and came back up that evening to write twenty pages by the light of his car. He has been chasing the same question ever since: what is consciousness actually made of?

The answer he has built over sixteen years with Jonathan Schooler at UC Santa Barbara is the General Resonance Theory. Three axioms. Everything resonates. Everything that resonates carries some flicker of mind, however faint. And things resonating together at the same frequency combine into a higher structure with a higher mind of its own. Atoms to cells to organisms. Possibly stars.

In this Brainforest Café conversation, Dennis pushes him further: into plant consciousness, the Nested AI Simulation Thesis, why Tam puts his p(doom) at 99.99999% and still insists the root of reality is Love, and into a question he wants to leave with you.

What would love do?

🎧 Tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy

Psilocybin evolved twice.

Not once, in the mushrooms everyone knows about. Twice, in two unrelated families that never shared the recipe.

A 2025 study pulled apart the enzymes of Inocybe corydalina, a fiber cap from a genus better known for producing one of the classic mushroom poisons, and found it builds psilocybin with a completely different toolkit from Psilocybe. Different enzymes. Different protein families. The same four chemical edits to tryptophan, run in a different order, several of them in reverse.

The two assembly lines share no reactions at all. They cross at exactly one point, a compound called 4-hydroxytryptamine, and then part ways again.

There is a twist. Because the fiber cap runs its steps out of sequence, baeocystin, which in Psilocybe is just a stepping stone on the way to psilocybin, comes off the fiber cap's line as a finished product. The pathway forks.

And the oldest question is still open: why would a mushroom bother making psilocybin at all? Defense is the leading guess. Nobody has proved it.

Read the full Field Guide, link in bio.

#Psilocybin #Mycology #Ethnopharmacology #ConvergentEvolution #mckennaacademy by @mckenna.academy

Ibogaine is not a "super psychedelic." It doesn't dissolve you into the world around you. It pulls you inward, and then something answers back.

In this episode of the Brainforest Café, Dennis McKenna sits down with Jonathan Dickinson: CEO and co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences, founder of Terragnosis, former Executive Director of the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, and author of Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind.

Part 1 follows Jonathan's personal path into this work:

🌿 From harm reduction in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to the ibogaine clinics of Mexico
🌿 His 2014 Bwiti initiation in Gabon, and what the mirror in that ceremony is really for
🌿 The bicameral mind: the voice, the guide, the second self that so many people meet under iboga
🌿 Why roughly half of people see no visions at all, and still come out changed
🌿 The long road to sustainable, Nagoya-compliant iboga, and why Gabon's forests were being emptied
🌿 Why "take two and call me in the morning" will never describe this medicine

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Part 2 follows in just a few days, going deeper into ibogaine's pharmacology, the Lacanian architecture of the experience, and the regulatory road ahead.

🎧 Listen now. Tap our bio to know more! by @mckenna.academy