DMT might be one of the best psychedelics out there, its effects are short-lived, it can be quite intense, and it allows for careful modulation of the dosage through trial and error.

With most psychedelics, working towards a dosage that won’t induce a difficult experience (read: hellish and psychotic) is tiresome. Their effects last for a long time, and the vast majority come with some amount of side effects if taken often or in large quantities.

Its more infamous cousin, 5-MeO-DMT, has a similar profile regarding safety and ease of titrating the dosage. As far as I’ve been told, its phenomenal character is such that it would be more unpleasant than DMT, but I can’t speak to that.

Thus, the two ideal candidates for introducing people to psychedelics.

Ayahuasca

Of course, this is a purely theoretical point, since reality operates on the principle of maximum irony, most people encounter these two compounds in a setting where they are mixed with various dangerous chemicals that:

a) Pose a risk of death and cause unpleasant (sometimes permanently damaging) bodily side effects (tachycardia, arrhythmia, hypertension, diarrhea, serotonin syndrome)

b) Reduces the intensity of the trip while making it last for hours instead of a few minutes

What is Ayahuasca? It used to be the collective name given to psychoactive beverages consumed by people in South America. But analogous beverages exist in other cultures, and its use has been spread throughout esoterically inclined circles beyond South America, your neighborhood’s shaman in Berkeley can probably cook it just as well as his traditional counterpart in the Amazon.

That being said, what’s common among almost all of the brews fitting the label is that they contain either DMT or 5-MeO-DMT and MAOI.

MAOs and DMT

Monoamine oxidases oxidize monoamines. Which is to say that it quickly destroys compounds like DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Inhibiting them lets monoamines stroll through the body, hitching a ride into the vascular system, all the way to the brain.

The odd thing about monoamines is that, in spite of their potential abundance in our diet, they can be absorbed in an intact state and can cross the blood-brain barrier; The only defense we have against sharing in large quantities of neurotransmitters from the plants and animals we eat are MAOs.

Having MAOs is nice, they make it so that we can eat cheese or grapefruit without having a heart attack, and they help maintain a balance of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. But they make DMT consumption tricky, however, we can get around this in several ways, listed here from least to most dangerous:

1. You could vaporize freebase DMT, due to the fast absorption in the lungs, MAOs there won’t be that big an issue.
2. You could IV the salt, resulting in the fastest, most potent, least dangerous trip... unless you IV freebase by mistake, or you IV a huge amount, in which case you might find the 5-HT2B effects a bit too much.
3. You could also inject it intramuscularly or subcutaneously, but similar caution applies and MAOs are present in the muscles [citation needed], I personally haven’t heard of anyone doing this outside PiKHAL.
4. Vaporize DMT and MAOIs, which potentiates the trip (aka changa)
5. You could ingest DMT salts (get freebase DMT from the park, mix with a drop of vinegar) and some MAOIs (from your local pharmacy) — this is rather unpopular
6. You could boil plants containing many compounds in unkown quantities, DMT and MAOIs among them, then drink the resulting mixture containing both (this is ayahuasca)

Why Drink Ayahuasca

So the natural question is, chemically, what’s the difference between ayahuasca and the other methods of consuming DMT?

Roughly speaking, the main thing ayahuasca seems to add is a bunch of other compounds one might extract from the plants via boiling them

The plants, temperature, and reactants used to make the brew vary, and no serious scientific investigation of popular mixtures has been done by psychedelic scientists or drug-policing agencies.

Based on the reports I’ve read, and the first-hand accounts told to me, ayahuasca differs from smoking DMT in that it’s less potent and causes significant nausea, often accompanied by vomiting and diarrhea.

This would agree with the view that boiling often improperly-ground or not-ground-at-all plants extract a lot less DMT than grinding them to a fine paste and using a proper solvent for extraction. Hence the reduced intensity.

I am honestly unsure what other compounds boiling would extract, and how those compounds interact might also change as a result of the MAO inhibition.

So prima facie I’d say ayahuasca could be interpreted as taking a small but unknown dose of one or more psychedelic monoamines with an unknown dose of MAOIs with an unknown dose or various other unknown compounds found in the respective plants, most of them probably harmless (e.g. cellulose).

I have to mention here that, in principle, all psychedelics cause nausea, and presumably, that could lead to vomiting and diarrhea. The potency and frequency of these side effects in ayahuasca trips are such that I’d expect it to result from ingesting poisonous compounds, and the GI reaction to them, rather than due to the effects psychedelics have on the nervous systems, but I can’t state this conclusively.

So why consume it ?

The sympathetic view is that taking a reductionist approach to a substance that dissolves the basis of reality far beyond the point where words such as objective or observation make sense, is deeply flawed.

Still… a less intense, longer-lasting trip with more risks and side effects is something that nobody ever would want. It’s hard for me to find anyone who’s inhaled vaproize DMT which prefers ayahuasca devoid of the setting in which it’s consumed.

The skeptical answer is that it’s a bunch of hype, (famous) people are often indoctrinated in the neo-puritan “drugs are bad” mentality and in the hippie “natural/organic/local means good” mentality, often parts of both. So when given the option to buy yellowish crystals from a dealer and smoke their awful-tasting evaporations from a metal pipe, they rejected it out of hand.

On the other hand, when presented with the idea of going into the Amazon to consume a “brew of natural local herbs, prepared by a shaman, used since ancient times to unlock the wisdom of the elders”, this bypasses their hold-ups about drugs (after all, it’s a traditional shamanic brew, not a drug) and ticks all the correct hippie checkboxes.

This results in famous people that never touched a psychedelic going to the Amazon to drink ayahuasca, they are obviously amazed because first encounters with psychedelics are awe-inducing almost by definition; Then tell their followers about it, resulting in hype being spread.

What I would recommend to anyone considering ayahuasca is to first take some common psychedelics in a more “usual” setting to diminish the risk of bad trips arising from the setting of an ayahuasca ceremony/party/whatever. It might also help you distinguish the “base” effects of the psychedelics from that of the ceremony itself.

… I write this, of course, purely for catharsis.

The principle of maximal irony dictates that the popularity of ayahuasca will keep increasing, together with other fun things like consuming toad venom until one of the famous people going to the Amazon dies… at which point people will blame DMT and the sentiment will turn against it.

The fact that said ayahuasca might contain no DMT, and the fact that in addition to DMT, it contains a poisonous mix of compounds will be of no relevance, by that time the compounds will be interchangeable in people’s minds. No amount of information will change that.

Why am I corss-posting this on LW ?

For one, because some people I know in the rat/postrat community seem to be enhanced with the idea of consuming ayahuasca.

Second, because I believe it's a good showcase of a decentralized psy ops that has led to many people having an obviously wrong model of reality, and understanding/studying such a thing should be of interest.