Avi: What was your aim in turning to academic research on hallucinogens?

Dennis: For me, partly it was an exercise in self-redemption. I went to La Chorrera not really knowing any science, or really knowing very much about anything (I was 20 at the time) but thinking I knew a whole lot. The experience at La Chorrera taught me that I really didn’t know anything, especially anything about science. A lot of what we’d encountered at La Chorrera seemed to challenge all scientific paradigms. But rather than rejecting science outright I determined that I really should learn how to ‘do’ science before rejecting it. And so that’s what I did. I was also interested in the nuts-and-bolts aspect of what had happened to us. I committed the error that many people who work with psychedelics do, the notion that somehow ‘the trip is in the drug’. Of course it isn’t in the drug, it’s in the interaction between the drug and the brain/mind, and it’s mostly in the latter. But in some respects I thought if I studied the drug, how it works in the brain, and so on, that I might somehow arrive at an understanding of how it could elicit such experiences. Of course studying the drug alone will not do that; but I think that many neuroscientists still approach it from that perspective, which is why the picture of what these things ‘do’ will remain incomplete.

Boing Boing: Interview: Dennis McKenna

See the Technoccult dossier on the Brothers McKenna for much more.