Are there long-term dangers to drinking ayahuasca?

There is a popular idea that repeated use of psychedelics over years will leave you 'fried', mentally impaired and out of touch with reality. Contrary to this, any long-term ayahuasca-drinkers I have met seem to have some indefinable human quality about them, a sort of glow and optimism. It's something that you are familiar with if you have hung around people who have done other mystical disciplines like yoga for many years.

I don't know what makes the difference between ayahuasca-drinkers and 'acid casualties'. It could be that ayahuaca is more benign, but seeing as no psychedelic can be linked to brain damage, it seems more likely that the benefits come from the supportive, ceremonial set-and-setting around ayahuasca-drinking.

A few scientific studies have investigated long-term effects of ayahuasca -

A 1999 study called 'Do hallucinogens cause residual neuropsychological toxicity?' concludes that "the literature tentatively suggests that there are few, if any, long-term neuropsychological deficits attributable to hallucinogen use."

A 2008 paper by the same author called 'Evidence of health and safety in American members of a religion who use a hallucinogenic sacrament' interviewed 32 ayahuasca drinkers. They had consumed ayahuasca between 20 and 1300 times and the researchers were not able to find any evidence of damage.

'Risk assessment of ritual use of oral dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and harmala alkaloids' is a systematic search of all the scientific literature about ayahuasca and DMT, especially looking at studies when animals were given these drugs over long periods of time. It was found that none of these studies found long-term damage.

Ayahuasca as a psychedelic for modern times

Ayahuasca is an interesting case. Whereas psilocybin and LSD became known in the West in the first half of the 20th century, and went through the excesses and backlash of the hippie movement, ayahuasca was a later arrival on the scene. As a result, it never had its reputation tarnished in quite the same way. Ayahuasca has never been abused much and has not been much used outside of its traditional context for healing and vision-seeking. This has given it a more 'legitimate' aura than other psychedelics. In my personal experience, whereas many old acidheads bear obvious damage from poorly-controlled experiences, long-time ayahuasca drinkers have that undefinable yet unmistakable human glow that comes from proper and fruitful investigation of one's mind and consciousness. This is weak anecdotal evidence and I do not expect it will convince anyone, but I know its truth for myself.

Several progressive researchers in psychology have recognized the unique position that ayahuasca holds in this regard.

Kenneth W. Tupper wrote a paper called The Globalization of Ayahuasca: Harm Reduction or Benefit Maximization?, in which he points out that in the South American cultures familiar with it, ayahuasca has always held a social role as a healer and teacher, never as a substance associated with criminality, recklessness or risk-taking, like the social role given to most psychoactives in the West. The question is - as ayahuasca enters Western culture, which role will it be given?

Jordi Riba, who did his PhD thesis on ayahuasca, published a paper in 2005 along with Manel Barbanoj titled, Bringing Ayahuasca to the Clinical Research Laboratory. They summarize their findings of 7 years of research into the pharmacology and physiology of ayahuasca, and give groundrules for good scientific research to be done on it. Although the paper considers ayahuasca as a scientific research tool rather than a healing agent, this is because they know that the scientific research must be very solid before clinical use can go ahead.

Also in 2005, the inimitable and controversial Dennis McKenna wrote Ayahuasca and Human Destiny. This short essay is a curious bridge between scientific research and hippie rhapsody.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Overall, there does seem to be a promising trend in which ayahuasca is slowly, cautiously taking steps towards becoming to Western culture what it has been to Amazonian culture: a healer, a teacher and a wise counsellor. This process must happen slowly, lest another anti-drug backlash condemn ayahuasca to the filthy fate of other mind-altering drugs.

How to extract DMT from mimosa hostilis

Forget the naphta and methanol based extractions you'll find on Erowid; they're out of date. Here is a much easier way to extract DMT from mimosa hostilis and similar plants. (It also works for extracting alkaloids from other plants, like mescaline from peyote.) The cool thing is that this uses only food-safe chemicals: namely edible lime, vinegar and limonene (essence of lemon). It was posted on the DMT-Nexus by 69Ron. Hats off to 69Ron!

1. Mix 100g of mimosa rootbark with 25g slaked lime
2. Add about 300ml water, enough water to make it wet, but not watery. Tap water is perfectly fine. Stir together for 5 minutes
3. Add 300ml of limonene. Mix well. Let sit for a few hours.
4. Put it in a coffee press to get rid of the solids
5. Add 25ml of vinegar to the liquid. Mix thoroughly.
6. Put it in a plastic bottle. The vinegar will go to the bottom. Pierce the bottle so that the limonene at the top purs off. Alternatively, buy a glass gravy seperator and seperate them that way. Don't throw out the limonene.
7. Evaporate the vinegar to leave slightly impure DMT crystals.
8. With the leftover limonene, repeat steps 5-7 two more times
9. Repeat steps 3-8 two or three times. You will be left with slightly impure DMT crystals, ready for smoking.

• You can get slaked lime cheaply here.
• You can get limonene cheaply here.
• And you can get mimosa hostilis cheaply here.
  

Is mimosa hostilis active without a MAOi?

When DMT is swallowed, it is destroyed in the stomach by an enzyme called monoamine oxidase. In order to bypass this, DMT may be taken orally with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (a MAOi). Ayahuasca is simply this orally-activate DMT-MAOi combo. So far so good.

Of course, the active ingredient in mimosa hostilis is DMT. So if we take mimosa hostilis orally without anything else, it won't have any effect, right? Wrong! Many people have reported that mimosa hostilis alone is orally active. Indeed, the traditional way of taking it is to just squeeze the roots in cold water for 15 minutes and drink the water - no MAOi involved.

What's going on here? How is a DMT-containing plant orally active? There are several theories. It is not thought that mimosa hostilis contains any MAOis itself, but it may contain chemicals that have a higher affinity for monoamine oxidase than DMT does, so they sorta mop up all the monoamine oxidase. Another theory is that mimosa hostilis contains chemicals that include DMT, bound within larger structures. The monoamine oxidasebreaks down these large chemicals, leaving DMT, which is then absorbed into the bloodstream.

What is Jungle Spice?

Extract the alkaloids from mimosa hostilis root bark, pull away the DMT, and you are left with a mysterious substance known in the community as 'Jungle Spice'. Jungle Spice is described as resembling a piece of red crayon and it appears to have some psychoactive properties.

We can be sure that Jungle Spice is no one alkaloid, but and impure mixture of several alkaloids found in mimosa hostilis. Apart from DMT, mimosa hostilis is known to contain several alkaloids. One of the most interesting is kokusaginine, which may compete with DMT for monoamine oxidase in the stomach, allowing the DMT to pass into the bloodstream. IT seems reasonable to assume that this is on the constituents of Jungle Spice.

In addition, there are kukulkan-A and kukulkan-B, two novel alkaloids which have been reportedly extracted from mimosa hostilis (though Jonathan Ott says that it was in fact Mexican tepescohuite "misreported" as mimosa hostilis.

Entropymancer, a member of the DMT-Nexus, has done a heroic job of compiling different reports on Jungle Spice. Check out his article for more info.

Lacking a proper mass spectrometry reading, we can't be sure what exactly Jungle Spice is. However, we can be sure it will continure to interest members of the psychedelic community, largely because of its unknown character.