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 >> In May 1999, psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna was diagnosed with a brain tumour
 and given between three and nine months to live.
 I contacted Terence by email and mentioned that I was making a documentary
 about shamans in the Amazon and asked if I could meet him and record an interview.
 Flying back home from the Amazon on December the 9th, 1999, just four months before he died,
 Terence gave me one of his last interviews at his home on the big island of Hawaii.
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 Terence had tried many natural therapy cures and had also recently undergone gamma knife surgery
 to try and remove the tumour.
 You've been here for a while?
 >> Oh, I finished the house about two and a half years ago and was here
 about two and a half years building it, so.
 >> Right.
 >> Yeah.
 >> Let me get Christie and --
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 >> Everyone was hoping for a miracle.
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 >> Why do you think governments, most governments in fact around the world have banned ayahuasca
 and made most psychotropics illegal?
 >> Well, I think a social system is the product of a process of, you could call it social,
 natural selection that civilization produces various religious ideas, political ideas.
 Some survive and some don't and it's because the social system is applying selective pressure
 and saying universal medical care for all, we don't need that.
 Sexual flexibility among teenagers, well we don't need that.
 So over time a social system is built out of what is saved and what is thrown away.
 And so when you start putting drugs into a social system
 that actually promote unusual ideas, you're pushing the most important buttons
 that a society has, the buttons that shape what it believes about life and death and value
 and marriage and childbearing and all these things.
 And so that's very sensitive stuff and inevitably becomes a point of contention
 and societies will arm wrestle over that up to and including putting you away for 20
 or 30 years for half a gram of grass or something.
 >> The war on drugs that America is sort of pushing around the world,
 what do you think the effect is of that and who's really behind it do you think?
 >> Well, wasn't the struggle against communism a kind of struggle against ideas
 and who thinks what and who is permitted to believe that people should be paid more
 than $3.80 an hour for whatever labor they're asked to do and some of this other stuff.
 So capitalism, if it doesn't have enemies, it will create enemies.
 It will point out these people or these people.
 And so I think it's a thing like that, that it's a struggle to control the political agenda.
 And I'm not a Marxist, I don't have much patience with that,
 but I do think how Marxism has talked about the value of work and worth
 and the productivity of the masses and all that.
 All that rhetoric carries right over into the so-called war on drugs,
 which is really a war against other people's values.
 It's a continuation of the Holocaust and cultural genocide and all the other efforts made
 by the phenomenal success of capitalism to shove its agenda down other people's throats.
 What do you feel about the fact that people could be put in jail for 12 years for drinking this stuff?
 Well, it's a disturbing tendency.
 I mean, it means that at least the US government has made a decision somewhere
 to push hard against this, which is always the first strategy.
 The first strategy is push hard against some trivial thing,
 like cannabis or LSD or something like that, and then once defeated in that strategy,
 then there is usually a period of negotiated, an effort to create some kind of negotiated settlement.
 And then once that fails, there's usually a squaring off
 and the issue is minimized and translated into something trivial.
 And we move on to the next great social issue.
 - Crazy. - It's crazy.
 What do you feel about the synthetic DMT and ayahuasca now being available?
 Do you think that the magic is lost when it's synthesized
 and there's no real ritual aspect to the taking of ayahuasca?
 Well, it's not so much that the ritual is lost as that the people who are doing the making
 and the taking and the shaking may not really understand what they're getting into.
 A drug like synthetic ayahuasca, pharmahuasca,
 do people realize this is the same thing as has been taken for thousands of years down there?
 Do they realize its role in shamanic healing and all this?
 It's just one more example of how everything is desacralized and corrupted.
 Because, you know, first ayahuasca has never been heard of,
 and the next thing you know, everybody wants it because it's all anybody's talking about.
 So it goes from this mystery to being a kind of a fad or a rage.
 And then it becomes an income source.
 And once it becomes an income source, it's a commodity,
 like journalism, sex, aluminum, whatever is being peddled on the open market.
 I would prefer to see ayahuasca remain at the status, let's say, of peyote,
 where the native peoples who are into it sort of keep the faith,
 understand how to make it and talk about it.
 And when there's a question as to what it all means,
 then you go back to those native people and listen to their myth and all that.
 There is data to show that ayahuasca is medically effective against malaria
 and intestinal parasites and things like that.
 So really, it's a basic part of this native medical system.
 And if instead of trying to put everybody in prison,
 we actually try to do research on this stuff and find out how it works
 and how it affects various conditions,
 we would probably extract its benefit much more quickly.
 Okay. So what about the combination of ayahuasca and the psychotria viridis?
 That seems to be a magic combination.
 Or is it that the DMT is able to be absorbed in the stomach?
 Whereas if--yeah, if you could just explain that relationship.
 Well, it involves the interrelationship between a brain-mind system
 that has had all the monoamine oxidase taken out of it pharmacologically.
 And all these psychoactive drugs seem to have a bigger, more dramatic impact
 in the presence of a lowered MAO threshold.
 And how this was discovered by Amazonian Indians millennia ago
 and not discovered by Western science until 1956 or something
 is just one of those peculiar facts about ethnobotany and ethnomedicine.
 But it's certainly true that you have a much more dramatic effect
 with the two in combination.
 And how many of these kinds of facts of folk science are out there to be discovered,
 we don't really know yet, but slowly it's all being unraveled.
 It's never been explained, you know, why there are so many plant psychedelics in the New World.
 The cohoba snuffs, the ayahuasca, the mushrooms in the New World, salvia divinorum,
 all of these things are New World, and this has been a social phenomenon,
 the exploration of which has been pretty much pushed by New World anthropologists and philosophers.
 If we'd had to depend on European philosophy for the content of the century,
 we'd all be reading Jacques Derrida and, you know, those kind of people.
 So it's a local phenomenon that's become global.
 The way we value the earth, the way we value commodities,
 the way we extract them and manufacture them into saleable goods,
 this will all be seen in a different way, I think.
 And again, it's an issue of capital and labor and how you value what you put your life into
 and that sort of thing.
 Well, what the shamans know that we don't is which plants how and where.
 And it took a long time to figure this out.
 They didn't invent the calculus.
 They didn't, you know, sailing vessels of great speed and power.
 None of that was pursued.
 What was pursued was these vegetable entities that can be coaxed out of the plant world.
 And the irony is that Europe, who set out, you know, in the 17th century to explore the world,
 to bring in Christian civilization, may have encountered phenomena and variants on civilization
 that will ultimately prove more powerful than what we were peddling.
 This discussion is by no means closed at this point.
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 I thought I knew a lot about psychedelics before I encountered DMT,
 and it showed me that I knew virtually nothing.
 Oh!
 This is salvia divinorum.
 Oh, yeah, this is a great shot.
 Full of flower.
 Uh-huh. Oh, wow.
 Yeah, you rarely see it so dramatically in flowering.
 Right here.
 This one?
 Yeah.
 Salvia divinorum, yeah.
 And what--
 Purple flowers.
 What are the effects of these? What part do you use?
 You use the leaf, and it has a compound called alpha-salvinorin in it,
 and it's very easily grown in the right soil.
 Roll up 80 leaves and chew them.
 Yeah, you just chew it?
 Chew it.
 And what's the effect?
 And eat it as you're--that's how the Mazatecs do it.
 Oh, Mazatecs.
 And what's the effect of it?
 Very strange.
 Holy synagenic psychedelic.
 It's very hard to describe, but--
 Psychedelic.
 --not really understood or known until 10 years ago or so.
 See, the salvia all through here.
 Uh-huh.
 And what's the legal status of that?
 It's legal.
 I believe, amazingly enough--
 Let's see.
 This is ayahuasca.
 That's why it was called Bamysteriopsis, because the leaves are opposed to each other like the rungs of a ladder.
 And it winds up into this.
 And it's in pieces back at the house.
 Oh, yeah.
 Now here, this vine going up so high, that's ayahuasca.
 Well, I think the shaman offers an immense example of courage.
 The shaman is not afraid of things which modern, post-modern people are afraid of, specifically madness, a kind of madness.
 People are afraid of drugs because they associate it with some kind of ultimate unhingement.
 As we gain shamans who can speak to us in our own vocabulary, this will fade away.
 This is, to some degree, the motivation for my career, is basically to say--to give people permission to say, "It's safe. It's scary. It's weird."
 But you're not going to end up in a straight jacket in some back ward.
 You'll live through this.
 It's no more terrifying than the world's largest roller coaster or one of those places.
 So permission is what I find people want from me.
 They want me to say, "Yes, I did it. It was very scary. I lived to tell the tale."
 I showed you there were more rabbits in the field than you thought, right?
 It's one of my other great points of view. I know it's really beyond explanation, but for you, what happens for you when you smoke DMT?
 I go to a place where language finds it very hard to pull over and look around.
 It's almost as though it takes you to a world that is not Englishable and, I suppose, Germanable and so forth.
 But as a native speaker of English, that's what it looks to me like is happening.
 The vehicle of language can only--
 Breaks down.
 Yeah, it breaks down.
 And no matter how you try and claw the air, it doesn't quite come over and give itself to you.
 So that's fascinating to me as a writer and a storyteller and someone with an interest in narrative and all that.
 The idea that there would be realities that you couldn't wrap a description around is fascinating.
 It grows more fascinating as life moves along.
 It seems like a miracle, an absolute miracle of some strange sort in the area of cognitive construction is taking place.
 How can someone benefit from that experience?
 Well, some philosophers would say such a thing is impossible.
 There aren't unspeakable realities.
 Somebody else would say, well, it's this or it's that.
 So it sheds light on certain questions of philosophy and heuristics and all that that seems to me that it gives real answers.
 I mean, maybe you don't believe these answers, but I know a convincing argument when I see it.
 If anybody with argument could do to you what DMT does to you, you'd embrace it in a hurry.
 What about ayahuasca?
 What do you think are the main benefits from people taking that in a ritualistic sort of context?
 Well, we're long away from ritual.
 I think rituals are what we need, that that's why we create sports leagues and beauty pageants and all these things,
 simply to reassure ourselves that in these ritual-confined spaces, these energies can be held.
 It's the part we are most distant from.
 And do you think you need a shaman to take you on those rituals or is the plant itself enough?
 No, the plant is more impressive.
 If it were a shaman, people would say, well, it's show business.
 I mean, I saw a guy cut a woman in half on stage once or I saw this or I saw that.
 But I think the fact that in the case of DMT, a matchhead-sized piece of orange wax can pull your entire philosophical world out from under you
 in about 15 seconds is very, very interesting.
 I mean, how long did it take you to learn to talk?
 Two years or a year and a half?
 How long does it take you to DMT?
 Oh, about 30 seconds.
 So it's very interesting.
 We've created enough alienation that it seems as though we are going to explore the uses of these shamanic technologies.
 So the high-tech culture, the scientific and materialist culture, seems to have made a choice to explore these things.
 And the shamanic Aboriginal culture seems to have made its choice.
 But it's going to integrate while we're going to have another one of these socially destructive debates about law and order and obligation and all the rest of it.
 That seems to me to be a waste of time.
 What do you think Ayahuasca has to offer humanity at this point in time, the change of the millennium?
 Well, all boundaries are dissolving.
 That's what the end of the millennium means.
 It means that the tribes of the Amazon Basin, the tribes of the New Guinea Highlands, the tribes of Oxford and Cambridge,
 everything is dissolving and humanity is reaching a kind of plural consensus.
 I mean, even the most sophisticated capitalist, let us say, is aware now that it won't do to cut down all the trees, that that's a mistake.
 So what's happening is a single human viewpoint is sort of coming into existence, a viewpoint that values nature, values natural resources,
 and tries to, however clumsily, to make some kind of peace out of the whole human mess that we're now mixed up in.
 I think what it brings is an empathy to the destruction of the planet.
 You know, the cutting of a rainforest is suddenly no longer completely abstract.
 It's actually something you can feel and relate to.
 And all political change begins with a change of feeling and value.
 So, you know, if we begin to see the aboriginal people of every continent as the holders of this knowledge,
 they will begin to look not so naive, not so foolish or something like that,
 but actually as sophisticated people who have developed a working relationship with these powers and things.
 And that's the only way you're going to get real political change on some of these issues.
 If we were having this discussion 30 years ago, we would not be talking about ayahuasca.
 We'd be talking about mushrooms and their potential.
 So I think the plants change, the drugs change, but the challenge stays the same.
 And the challenge is to build a humane and human world without doing damage to the humanity that's already in it.
 So what's your view for the future? Do you feel confident or pessimistic, optimistic that humanity can take on this challenge?
 It requires dedication and intelligence, not so much among our shaman and our inner voyagers,
 but among the legislators and the people who actually are going to have to make the social change.
 That's why what goes on in the Netherlands is so important.
 You know, these are the most liberal people in the world.
 Well, are they liberal enough to actually change the basic structure of their society?
 I mean, talk is easy, but can they actually make the change?
 What they're trying to do is establish the notion of a thought crime.
 You know, that it's a crime to consider restructuring the state this way or this way.
 And that will, you know, if we have not learned anything from the 20th century,
 we should have learned that wars of ideology are hopeless and just bring incredible grief and loss of life.
 So I'm hoping that what the 21st century can mean is movement beyond ideology and an actual rational,
 and I think it is rational approach to integrating the irrational into how we think about society, city planning, social management, and all the rest of it.
 So what were you saying about the patent of ayahuasca?
 Well, some years ago, a dozen years ago or more, a fellow patented ayahuasca.
 Somehow this happened. It's not supposed to be possible with plants.
 And then a group of several South American tribes put a lawsuit on him, and it took a lot of money and years and years to work this to the Supreme Court.
 And about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that you can't patent a plant, that a plant is not an invention.
 It's not made by human genius. It is a product of nature.
 So no plants can be patented, and that patent was declared void.
 So that's a good thing.
 There is a thing called the UN Convention on Narcotics, which was something that when the US and NATO and all that completely controlled the UN,
 they produced this document, which if you signed it, you were basically joining this club which said you would commit resources, time, manpower to eradicating all these drugs.
 And that was pretty much done through the late '50s and then on into the '60s.
 And then, of course, LSD was very threatening because you can get 100,000 hits under one postage stamp.
 Well, for somebody who's trying to control something that they look upon like nerve gas or something, a "weapon" with that kind of a description makes people very nervous indeed.
 And so it came out of that.
 So why do you think psychedelics are so threatening to these establishments?
 Because they produce unexpected ideas and conclusions.
 That's what strange politics does.
 You go in a Freemason and a Republican and you come out, God knows what, a polyamorist and an anarchist or something like that.
 You talk about the dominated culture in your books. Do you think that has any reasons why these plants have been made illegal?
 Yeah, because they nibble away at the edges of orthodoxy.
 Once you get the idea that a mushroom can talk to you in your native language and propose various things, life never looks quite the same again.
 In a sense, you could say civilization was the journey from fairyland to scientific materialism.
 Well, then there you are. You think you've conquered scientific materialism, but here's a mushroom, here's a vine, here's a morning glory.
 And they all give you a message back that is just so peculiar, you don't know what to do with it.
 Well, there's a lot of evidence and discussion about whether or not it gives you telepathic powers or science fiction-like powers.
 This could be. I mean, two brains six feet apart are both biochemical oscillators.
 I wouldn't consider it a miracle if it were found that brains floating in ayahuasca have a kind of supernatural connection.
 And if the tendencies of past history are to continue, that's what it would have to be.
 That we're on the brink of designing drugs, of moving our technological design process to a point where we can actually design drugs that extract power from them that we never had or dreamed of before.
 And that would carry us well beyond the Industrial Revolution. I mean, that would be the new world.
 And just briefly, your recent journey facing whatever it is that you've faced, death, whatever, has there been any revelations for you about your journey, about death, about where you're going?
 You mean you're referring to the fact that I have glioblastoma multiforme, which is a form of brain cancer?
 Well, I wish I could say I'd had more insight into death. I've had a fair amount of insight into dying, which I find a very alarming prospect.
 Death itself is so far beyond ordinary experience. The threat of dying doesn't really move you toward understanding it.
 Death is the great mystery around which religions are built, and being able to say, "I know what it is, I know how it works," is the way you start a congregation and get a little community going.
 I would say the big surprise for me was I'm not afraid of death the way I thought I would be. It's just such an intellectual question mark that you just move to the next page, because there's nothing to be said about death except that it seems to last rather a long time.
 If you had one thing that you wanted to say to people from all your learnings that you've had through your life, what would that one message be to someone?
 That following your own curiosity is a better method for exploring the world than any of the methods offered. Sheer curiosity is the thing that I've always let carry me along, and I have no regrets about any of this.
 I think it's worth the life to put these issues in front of people.
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