Dennis McKenna: Carlos Tanner has been immersed in a study of Ayahuasca and plant medicine in the Amazon rainforest since 2003, founding the Ayahuasca Foundation in 2009 in Iquitos, Peru. Through the foundation, he organizes healing retreats and educational courses led by indigenous curanderos, aiding participants in addressing conditions from depression to cancer while deepening the understanding of Amazonian ancestral traditions. Since 2017, the foundation has collaborated with Onaya Science on research into Ayahuasca’s therapeutic effects, yielding over a dozen published articles that demonstrate significant reductions in symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD, chronic pain, and other health challenges. Carlos, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the Brainforest Cafe. It is my pleasure to be with the man himself.

Carlos Tanner: Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here.

Dennis McKenna: Well, I’ve been looking forward to it for some time. You know, there are any number of places. You are very familiar with Iquitos. You know that there are hundreds of retreat centers and a whole spectrum of services offered, and so on. Many of them I would not wish on my worst enemy. Some, you know, I would recommend. I regret that I have never been to the Ayahuasca Foundation. I’ve never been to an event there. However, in 2019, I was there briefly and you were not. You were somewhere else. There were very few people there—I guess it was just a caretaker and a cook and so on—but I got a look at the place and it’s very nice. I mean, the setting is wonderful, and you seem to have plenty of room. You have a perfect spot, and it just seems very well set up for what you’re doing.

From all I can tell from your movie and other things that I’ve reviewed, you’re doing this the right way. You are informing your clients, and they know what to expect. You have a good relationship with the local community, the Shipibo community. Basically, you’re ticking all the boxes, Carlos, for what seems to me to be a well-run retreat center—owned and operated by Gringos, right, but working closely with the local community. That’s important.

Carlos Tanner: Thank you so much for saying that. Yeah, I wish I could have been there for your visit. You know, you and our history goes way back because we were both part of a film

called The Shaman and the Scientist.

Dennis McKenna: No,

Carlos Tanner: You were the star of the film. I was on camera but I was assisting, because at that time I was an apprentice to the shaman—

Dennis McKenna: Don Juan Tangoa Paima, right. Yes, he was a wonderful man, and I was very sad to hear when he passed away. But that little film, you know, kind of made a lot of people open their eyes to the promises of plant medicines in general in the Amazon and the whole issue.

Your foundation has been doing what looks to me like pioneering work because you’re doing more than just offering retreats. You do offer retreats, but you’re also doing research. So, you qualify. I guess the name “Ayahuasca Foundation” is proper because not only are you offering retreats and bringing healing to people through the Ayahuasca medicine, but you’re learning things and you’re publishing things. So, tell me, what did you do before this and what got you into this?

Carlos Tanner: Right before I went down to Peru, I was the production manager of an alternative news weekly called the Valley Advocate. So, I basically built the paper; I would construct it. In fact, in the early stages of my job, we were cutting out articles and pasting them on a large board that would get photographed. It sounds so archaic, but while I worked there—this is dating you, Carlos—yeah, I’m 51 years old. Maybe that helped. But then we transferred over to a fully digital format, which I’m sure every newspaper is now. My job was to figure out how to take all these oddly shaped items and fit them all into the pages of a newspaper. I really enjoyed that puzzle. Each week, I would get my hands on a puzzle and solve it by putting those pieces together.

But during that time, I also spiraled deep into an opiate addiction. Part of that was me hoping that getting a career job was going to resolve some of the depression that I had in my earlier years. I put all my eggs in one basket: Once I get a career, get money, get a house, and the things that you want to have in your life, then I won’t be depressed anymore. But that wasn’t the case. That actually made me more depressed because I felt like if that wasn’t the solution, then there wasn’t a solution. That’s when I kind of said, “Well, then I don’t really care,” and began using substances that helped to alleviate that suffering, even if only temporarily.

This led me to a severe addiction, which eventually led to me waking up in my car underwater, having blacked out behind the wheel and driven into a river. That was a big wakeup call for me in 2003. That’s why I ended up going to the Amazon to save my life and save myself from my own addiction. I did so with Don Juan’s help. Don Juan Tangoa Paima, whom you mentioned, invited me to become his student while I was with him. I was so fascinated by my own healing process. I wanted to understand it, I wanted to learn how to do it, and I just wanted to know more and more about it. So, I accepted that offer, moved in with him in 2004, and lived with him for four years. That’s when you and I first met.

Dennis McKenna: Right, that’s when we met. Well, you’re not alone. I think many people who discover Ayahuasca medicine come to it at a time of crisis in their lives, and it sounds like that’s where you were. You were depressed, you were addicted, and your hopes for a career were proving to be a disappointment and maybe even a trap. So you reached out for this, you went to Peru—the very fact that you went on this journey seeking relief speaks well of you and sets you apart, because many people would not do that. You trained with Don Juan Tangoa Paima. Did

you ever host, did you ever organize or host the space for retreats or Ayahuasca ceremonies, or was this more of a personal thing?

Carlos Tanner: Well, it started out personal. I was just his apprentice, so I lived with him for several years. But along the way, I started wanting to facilitate. I believe you were the keynote speaker at the first Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos. Don Juan was asked to participate, and so we started having gringos come to our home for those ceremonies. Before that, we were just serving the local population. At that point, I saw that perhaps there would be an opportunity for us to work with people from outside of the community if my skills in organizing could facilitate that. That was my first idea, that maybe we could offer a program.

Then it was really about organizing my own notes as a student. I had made audio recordings of the ceremonies over the years I lived there, and I transcribed, translated, and even set them to musical notation. I was reviewing all of that and thought, “Wow, what if someone had handed me all of this when I arrived? How much further along would I be now having had all these materials already given to me?” That was a big light bulb moment. I realized I could do that now. I could offer all of the things that I’ve learned over these years to someone who might want to show up and do something similar to what I did.

That was really what gave birth to the Ayahuasca Foundation: the desire to teach everything that I had learned as a student, but in the context of the paradigm that you and I grew up in, which is certainly distinct from the ancestral or indigenous paradigm. That became my passion. If I were to try to describe what I do or what my gift is, it would be to bridge the two paradigms in a way that can be understood by both, describing something that’s really a challenge to put into words.

Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Well, yes, you’re definitely doing the right thing. This bridging of these two worlds is something you and I are very much on the same page about. The McKenna Academy, as we’ve evolved into whatever we are today, has moved into the space of education. We have courses and that sort of thing that we offer. We’ve just completed a rather comprehensive ethnobotany curriculum that we’re offering to people. I don’t really need to go on about the McKenna Academy because people can look at the website, but my impression is that you are working with local Shipibo people to operate this center in a very responsible way. As you said, if you’d had the tools when you came to Iquitos that you’re now providing to your clients, you would have gotten much further. So, you saw a need.

As somebody that’s been working around Iquitos, you see that the landscape is very uneven when it comes to these retreats. I mean, some are operated responsibly, and some are basically not anything you’d want your worst enemy to go to. Most of them are somewhere in between. But my impression is that you very much emphasize good preparation. People need to educate

themselves about it. You provide the tools to do that, and then you offer these programs. How does that work for you? Are these events frequent enough and available to people? Do they keep the foundation afloat, or are you always in a financial crisis? How does that work?

Carlos Tanner: I wish I could say that I was not in a financial crisis, but I don’t make a lot of money. I care so much to support the community, especially to support all of the relationships that I’ve developed. I think a great way to understand the ancestral tradition is through the lens of relationship. The indigenous people were constantly in relationship with the elements of nature. They developed relationships with the plants and with the elements of their environment, such that they were fully interconnected to it. The dynamics of those relationships really determined the achievements they were able to gain in health or healing, as well as the overall maintenance of their well-being.

I have been fortunate enough to have a long-standing relationship with one Shipibo family. From the very beginning, the Ayahuasca Foundation was a partnership between me and a Shipibo family, with the two of us sharing the same vision to spread indigenous wisdom—specifically the wisdom of the Shipibo traditions—to the rest of the world. I’ve maintained that relationship for 18 years. Because of that, I’ve really come to see how important those relationships are, including the relationships that I have with the community, which you got to see when you visited our center. Those are really important aspects, if not the most important aspects, of running a business as I see it.

But they also translate into basically every aspect of our lives. Specifically with healing, I feel like the reintroduction or the remembering of our interconnectivity with nature is a big part of the healing process. That is something that Ayahuasca traditions focus on a lot: developing that relationship and that energetic exchange with a higher being, a spirit, the plants, or just nature in general. I try my best to offer the programs that we offer, but I also try to make them available to as many people as possible. I try to keep the prices reasonable, and in the end, I just want to take care of my family and also be able to take care of the dozens of families that are now employed by the Ayahuasca Foundation.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, well, that’s wonderful. So the relationship with the family of Juan Tangoa Paima continues. But regarding the curanderos or curanderas—how

many curanderos do you have working with you? Are they from that family, or are they from

this local community that you’re supporting through your activities?

Carlos Tanner: Yeah, like you mentioned, Juan Tango unfortunately passed away. I still feel like I will always be a member of his family; they really adopted me. I always do everything I can to continue to support them. Actually, it’s a cool story with Juan, because when I met him, his children didn’t have plans to follow in his footsteps, and he didn’t want them to because he was

a very poor person. He lived in a shack, essentially; it was not exactly the life that you would want your children to have. Then, because of the work that we started together offering programs, people from around the world were able to come with tremendous respect for him, wanting to learn from him. It really inspired his own children. His daughter and son are still offering ceremonies and continuing his tradition, which is fantastic.

But they weren’t at a place where they could teach. It requires a very special quality to be able to teach, especially something as complex as an Ayahuasca tradition. So, I was fortunate enough to meet Don Enrique Lopez, whose own passion for teaching matched what I was looking for exactly. That’s the Shipibo family that I work with. But I’ll forever consider myself a member of Don Juan’s family, and I keep in close contact with them. I live pretty close to where they are in Iquitos.

That Shipibo family also has a very special characteristic: they come from the first officially recognized Shipibo community, Roaboya, and their grandfather was the koraka (the chief of that community) and was also a curandero. They come from a very unique and special lineage.

However, the community that we have our center in is the Mishana community. It’s not actually a Shipibo community; it’s the remnants of the enslaved tribes that were eventually freed from the rubber boom, and they established that community. So it’s not really a tribe as much as a collection of indigenous people that came together out of necessity, because they were unfortunately decimated during that time of slavery that lasted a few generations during the rubber boom in the late 1800s to early 1900s.

Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Well, so this community, by taking form, basically is a syncretic community, and all these people gather together, bring their knowledge, and bring their traditions. I assume there’s a lot of cross-fertilization. You can’t really isolate the practice of what Luis Eduardo Luna calls—I think it’s a good term—vegetalismo. It is a mishmash of many different traditions. Indigenous groups have their own practices, but in a mestizo environment, all these things come together and enrich each other. I don’t think they corrupt each other; I think they enrich each other.

You mentioned Don Juan’s children decided that maybe being an ayahuasquero was not condemning themselves to poverty, which is the case for many local curanderos who are not working with gringos and are just serving their communities. What’s your impression of the economic, sociological, and other impacts of the Ayahuasca tourism industry? You’re really at the heart of it in a certain way, which doesn’t need to be a pejorative characterization.

Carlos Tanner: Yeah, I moved to Iquitos 22 years ago, and I’ve been able to witness that significantly. I would say I have a pretty good handle on it. My personal feeling, based on my own experiences with Don Juan’s family as a reference, is that those traditions were in danger

of disappearing. There’s evidence of that all over the world, right? You and I came from ancestry that had shamanism. Every single one of us is the descendant of ancestors that did have a form of shamanism in their culture, and most of those have sadly disappeared. The Amazon was one of the later ones to be affected, I think because the Amazon itself was so resistant to encroachment by foreign invaders or colonization just because the environment was so harsh.

But they did show up. They did make it, and that certainly wasn’t because of Ayahuasca tourism. You and I flew on a plane into the airport at Iquitos; we didn’t make that city. It was the rubber barons—who were notably oppressive—and the oil barons. There were industries that came before us, and those industries were not the result of Ayahuasca tourism.

I feel that Ayahuasca tourism brought a different perspective. It viewed indigenous people not as savages or primitive, but actually as the carriers of wisdom that we lacked. There was a real shift in the level of respect and interpretation that we had towards indigenous culture, and I feel like it played a really important role in the preservation of that indigenous wisdom. Like you said, a tradition is like a living being—like a tree that grows new branches, bears fruit, and wants that fruit to grow in other places. The maple tree is a great example. You’re Canadian, or are you Canadian?

Dennis McKenna: I’m a dual citizen now. Yes, Canadian-US. The maple tree is a famous tree because it produces a seed that’s encased in a wing, and it helicopters that seed to another location such that it grows a new tree.

Carlos Tanner: I think tradition does that too. And I like the vine behind you in that picture; it produces a seed that’s also encased in a wing.

Dennis McKenna: Good point. So yes, it flies its seed to another location.

Carlos Tanner: And I think tradition is very similar in that it grows new branches that weren’t there before, and it also produces fruit that wants to spread to new locations.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think that’s true. The tradition is a living thing, and obviously, it’s not immune, nor should it be, nor can it be insulated from the effects of globalization. Ayahuasca tourism is basically an aspect of that. But as you point out, these traditions would be disappearing if nobody cared. The so-called developed world has noticed, and in its usual acquisitive, capitalist orientation, it acknowledges that indigenous people have this incredible gift. Ayahuasca is kind of at the center of it, but they have incredible knowledge of their biotic environment, particularly the plants that they rely on. So, it has had a benefit in that respect.

But it’s also changed the tradition. The way vegetalismo was practiced when it was just

one curandero in a community, or a couple of them serving their local community, was a very

different practice. Often, it wouldn’t be the people getting treatment drinking it;

the ayahuasquero would take Ayahuasca, and the people would be there for treatment. Now, in the tourism environment, tourists expect to drink Ayahuasca. They’re not going to pay thousands of dollars to go there and watch somebody drink it. So, it’s changed, and that’s fine. You can’t hold back change, but it can be disruptive, I think.

I’m on the edge about whether the net effect is positive or negative. I think for the people that do make connections with organizations like the Ayahuasca Foundation and a number of responsibly run retreat centers, it’s a net benefit. Do you think that it sparks jealousy in the larger community, or is the community more accommodating to that? Is there a perception that these gringos have come along and now the guy who just lived in the shack next door, who was the local curandero, is now an Ayahuasca superstar? That’s got to lead to some envy and jealousy. Do you find that or not?

Carlos Tanner: I think that’s unavoidable. I don’t know a single industry where you wouldn’t find that, so I feel like that’s probably just a fact of human nature. But I do recognize the potential pitfalls whenever two paradigms come into contact with each other, especially if one of them claims superiority—which there’s a probability of when a modern culture like Western culture is full of itself—so that they can’t see what the other is offering. They often assume that because we are developed, we are superior, which is not at all the case.

Dennis McKenna: Right, exactly. But unfortunately, it lends itself to not really listening. We translate and filter everything through the lens of our paradigm. If we have grown up to believe a certain worldview or cosmology, every experience we have is filtered through that cosmology to give the meaning we end up with. I don’t know if we’re doing it intentionally, but it is how we perceive and interpret our reality.

Carlos Tanner: And I think that is the biggest challenge. We’ve worked with Onaya Science—and big shoutout to Simon Ruffell, Nige Netzband, and WaiFung Tsang who formed Onaya Science, which you referenced has published over a dozen articles already. They began by essentially translating what the curanderos or shamans were saying into a language that fit their paradigm. But they had enough respect and integrity to truly listen and dive into the Shipibo tradition enough that they started to say, “Hmm, maybe I should just listen to what they’re saying instead of thinking I know what they mean.”

If you can do that, you really open the door for an incredible bridge to be formed, sharing energies, knowledge, and wisdom with each other. That’s the goal. But I have definitely talked to several people that run retreats or ceremonies, and I wouldn’t agree with the way they interpret the experience. In modern medicine, if you take a medication, it’s simply a chemical response. Your consciousness doesn’t really have much involvement—at least, that’s the

perception. But the Ayahuasca tradition isn’t a chemical response perception, at least not from the indigenous perspective. It’s very much an art form perspective.

In a similar way, you could say that a musical instrument produces a sound according to its scientific construction or technology. That’s certainly true, but that doesn’t make the music. It takes a musician to express what’s in their soul and to actually produce that magic of music that we love and what touches our souls. That to me would be a better way of understanding an ancestral healing tradition as complex as Ayahuasca. It’s not about the paint, the brush, or the canvas; it’s how all of those pieces are put together by the musician sharing their gift.

Dennis McKenna: You can’t separate it from the cultural context, nor would you want to. It’s not just the plants, as you say. When it comes to preserving this knowledge and these traditions, the interest of the wider world has definitely helped to keep them alive, but it’s also transformed them in some ways. Now, Ayahuasca has become global; it’s spread all over the place, not necessarily taking its traditions with it. There’s probably as much Ayahuasca being grown in Hawaii as there is brought around Iquitos. It happens to like that environment, and it’s been exported from the Amazon.

Well, I can claim some credit or blame for it. I’m probably the person who first introduced Ayahuasca to the Big Island in 1976 in the wild. That vine—Plowman 6040—was the collection number in the Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu when I was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii back in 1976. During that period, I got access to that vine and transplanted a cutting to the Big Island, to my brother’s foundation, the Center for Botanical Dimensions. That became the mother vine that basically seeded the whole island, through cuttings that people took—some authorized, some not. But it is extremely common now, especially on the Big Island.

This is inevitable; this is what plants do. You can talk all you want about the Colombian exchange and appropriating medicinal treasures, but plants want to spread, and knowledge wants to spread. So, we have to be clear about how we deploy this knowledge. We must always maintain respect for the roots of the tradition.

The traditions and knowledge of Ayahuasca have the potential to heal millions of people. If there was enough Ayahuasca to heal millions of people—and there’s not—we probably shouldn’t regret that, because we’d have to have… But that does touch on something I wanted to ask you. Do you work with this community or other communities to develop sustainable supplies for your medicine? Of course you do. How do you do that?

Carlos Tanner: Well, we have property. So, we’ve planted over a thousand vines, but also members of the Mishana community have chakras. I’m actually a member of the Mishana community now, which was a tremendous honor for them to allow me to be part of their community. And so we all have a piece of land that we’re granted by right of being a member of

the community, and several of them grow Ayahuasca vines on them, which allows me to purchase them from the community and support them that way. But on our own property, we grow up to a thousand vines as well.

Dennis McKenna: Of course you would, if you knew that was the most important element of your business. But I’m curious to know… in my world, Richard Evans Schultes is kind of the greatest hero. I think he really opened the eyes of the world to the potential of plant medicine and indigenous tradition. You were certainly one of the incredible pioneers of bringing plant medicine knowledge or awareness to the world, and like you said, you’ve kind of literally brought ayahuasca to Hawaii. How do you feel about your own personal impact? If it’s okay for me to ask you a question, I’m just curious about how you view that.

Carlos Tanner: Well, you know, I’m conflicted about it, actually. I have mixed views. In one respect, the spread of Ayahuasca was obviously going to escape from its ancestral home. Now it’s become a globally distributed plant, and the knowledge associated with it is widely deployed but also widely changed—not necessarily adhering to the original traditions, though that doesn’t mean they’re not good traditions. Lately, I’ve been saying that people should not go to Iquitos or Peru to get Ayahuasca because of the adverse impacts on the communities and the economic aspects. But the example of the way you’re doing it, the way the Ayahuasca Foundation is doing it, is an example of how we can do this ethically so that everyone benefits. Normally, when people ask me where to go for a retreat in Peru, I usually tell them not to do it. But now, I have to say, “Well, actually, go to the Ayahuasca Foundation,” because you’re not unique, but you seem to be doing the right thing.

What I’ve often talked about is that rather than bringing tourists down to Peru, we should find a way to bring the medicine up north to Europe, Canada, and the US. Of course, there are legal issues there. But if a way could be found where wellness or healing centers in the US or Canada could partner with these communities to import Ayahuasca under light regulations so they could offer them, that would be the best of both worlds.

Actually, the UDV and Santo Daime churches exemplify that because they had to go to the Supreme Court to get permission to use Ayahuasca. Now that they have it, they have supply chains and good relations with the DEA. The DEA knows what they’re importing, and there’s no diversion. The idea of diversion with something like Ayahuasca is kind of ridiculous. They are an example of doing good work, but the central problem is that you shouldn’t have to be a church to do this. You should be able to say, “I have a healing center in northern British Columbia, and I want to bring it in to use it there.” We need to find ways to do that that don’t break laws, developing reasonable regulatory mechanisms to allow that to happen so we bring the medicine to the people rather than the people to the medicine. Bringing tourists to Peru has both beneficial and harmful aspects; that’s just the nature of the beast. With respect to

psychedelics in general, the whole goal is to maximize the benefit and minimize the harm, which requires a thoughtful approach to regulation and use. I agree with you in many aspects. My concern about bringing Ayahuasca up to organizations forming in other countries is: does the tradition travel with the medicine? Are the people using it properly trained?

Carlos Tanner: Yeah, and that’s a big part of our organization, offering that education and training to understand the principles of the tradition. I saw people serving medicine who didn’t understand it, and if that’s going to happen, at least we can try to teach them some of those principles. What you’re describing is happening. There are churches using freedom of religion to gain legalization, and some churches outside of the UDV and Santo Daime have recently earned the right or been granted permission by the DEA to use ayahuasca as a sacrament. Some of those churches actually have students of ours who received their training. I think that makes a really big difference.

But at the same time, life is going to happen, and if new traditions develop, that’s how it will occur. I recognize and agree with the conflict you describe, but at the same time, I put my ultimate faith in the earth and the consciousness of the earth to know what she’s doing. I feel like she knows better than me what her grand plan is.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, you and I resonate on that level. If you look at it from a 30,000-foot level, we’re in this strange historical juncture where the world is discovering Ayahuasca, and where is that going to go? We can’t really predict where it will be in 50 or 100 years. But as a biologist by training, maybe that colors my perspective—we’re looking at co-evolution here. We’ve co-evolved with these sacred, medicinal plants. Co-evolution plays out on scales of hundreds and thousands of years, not decades. That relationship with the human species is not going away. Hopefully, our relationship with Ayahuasca will help preserve the environment, give people respect for nature, and be ultimately beneficial.

You can’t separate Ayahuasca from the tradition, and from a biological perspective, we’re talking about symbiosis. Humans have symbiotic relationships with organisms in their environment, and Ayahuasca is certainly one of those.

I also wanted to touch on something else the Ayahuasca Foundation is doing that is a little different than many other retreat centers. Number one, you’re doing research and publishing it, and you’re offering Ayahuasca for a spectrum of illnesses and disorders that is broader than what people usually think of. People think of PTSD, depression, and addiction, but your work has expanded beyond that. You’re working with some physicians who see potential for Ayahuasca to treat a lot of things that Western medicine is not equipped to deal with. In that sense, you’re a pioneer. A person may come to your center not specifically for Ayahuasca, but

because you offer alternative treatments that no one else can. Would you like to say a bit about

that?

Carlos Tanner: Yeah, I appreciate you giving me the chance to do that. One of the big things I realized when I moved to the Amazon was that very few of the partner medicinal plants that accompany Ayahuasca in this complex, elaborate healing tradition were traveling with the Ayahuasca itself. That was a big emphasis for our programs. Yes, Ayahuasca is at the heart of the process, but there are so many other plant remedies that play a crucial role in the overall treatment.

In a 10-day retreat at our center, you drink Ayahuasca five times, but you also take a purgative to cleanse your digestive system. You take medicines to cleanse your central nervous system, circulatory system, and respiratory system. You take vapor baths with plant vapors to detox and remove toxins, and plant baths to lower inflammation. There is so much more to the entire plant medicine tradition. Unfortunately, because Ayahuasca is such a unique experience, the other plants don’t get as much attention.

We’ve worked with the Heroic Hearts Project for the last three years, specifically with combat military veterans suffering from PTSD. Along the way, we saw noticeable physical benefits. A woman in the program last year relieved her paralysis caused by a neurological disorder that had paralyzed half of her face. By the end of the 10-day retreat, it was gone, even though there was no treatment for it in the US. We also had a patient with cancer who was healed back when I worked with Don Juan, and he is still cancer-free 15 years later.

Next month, we will be hosting a retreat with Athletes Journey Home, an organization founded by former UFC fighter Ian McCall, for athletes who suffer from traumatic brain injuries to look at how this healing tradition can address physical brain injury. I have a lot of confidence we will make progress. If you only consider Ayahuasca as the medicine, you might think mental and emotional issues are the primary benefits. But if you include the entire plant medicine tradition, you open yourself up to treating every condition, because that was the healing tradition for every generation prior to now.

Dennis McKenna: Right? So this healing is very dependent on the environment.

Carlos Tanner: This healing takes place in a holistic environment.

Dennis McKenna: It’s a chemical ecology of these plants that these communities and traditions

are immersed in. Those plants are very hard to transplant anywhere outside the Amazon. Hawaii may be a small exception, only because when I was doing my graduate work in the 80s, I collected a lot of these medicinal plants used in the dietas and they are growing there, though I don’t have access to them anymore. But it’s very hard to take this holistic healing model and transplant it. You can rip Ayahuasca out of its context, but you can’t transplant the context itself.

And that’s a good argument for not trying to replicate it elsewhere because it can’t be fully replicated. Anything you bring out of that environment is going to be chemically impoverished and lose its integrity.

Carlos Tanner: There is, I think, my greatest hope and vision for the Ayahuasca Foundation: if we can remind modern Western society of our connection to nature and that important energetic dynamic of relationship that ancestral traditions still hold, we can correct a foundational inaccuracy in the Western paradigm—the belief that we are separate from nature. That separation has led to a personal health epidemic of loneliness and the societal destruction of our environment. If we can correct that by giving people the opportunity to experience and witness the truth of that connectivity, perhaps we can revive our own ancestral wisdom.

We don’t necessarily need the fully intact Ayahuasca tradition from the Amazon to exist in Europe. There was a very rich European tradition that could be revived should we reconnect with that higher intelligence of nature. I assume those plants in Europe are yearning to recreate that relationship with us again. If I can introduce that connection, that would be amazing.

Dennis McKenna: You make a very strong and interesting point, which is that you can’t simply transplant the tradition elsewhere. We’d both agree that the cultural challenge of our time is our estrangement from nature. Psychedelics can catalyze the realization that we are not separate from nature, we do not own it, and we do not dominate it. As was told to me years ago: “You monkeys only think you’re running the show.” That’s definitely true.

So perhaps the realizations someone has in Peru can help them return to their own countries to rediscover existing traditions that have been suppressed for so long. Every ecology has its own teacher plants; mushrooms are a great global example and are not owned by any one particular tradition. They are co-evolutionary catalysts. We need to rediscover those traditional pharmacopias that exist in Europe and North America that have been ignored and suppressed for so long.

Well, this has been a very fine conversation. Carlos, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate this. I think we’ve covered a lot of territory, and we’ll put a link to your film and your foundation on the website so people can find out where they can sign up if they want to visit you in Iquitos. Is there anything we have to say that we didn’t say?

Carlos Tanner: There is so much more to talk about, but we touched on some really good topics. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I hear you 100% about your own perception of being conflicted about your role in the globalization of plant medicine, but I feel confident I speak on behalf of countless people when I say we are so appreciative of your contributions.

You have demonstrated incredible integrity and respect for indigenous culture in sharing their wisdom and plant knowledge with the world. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for

contributions like yours, so I really appreciate everything you’ve done and continue to do. It has

been a pleasure to speak with you today.

Dennis McKenna: Thank you. Thank you so much. You made me feel a little less guilty.

Carlos Tanner: Maybe I can end with this one thing: I really feel like the plants treat me like their child, and that humans are like the children of nature, the forest, or the plants. As a parent, I know how much I love my daughter and would do anything for her, and I never want her to feel guilt, shame, or fear. That has helped me understand that the plants don’t want us to feel guilty, ashamed, or afraid either. They love us like their children and want us to be the best humans we can be. That’s what I’ve come to see.

Dennis McKenna: I totally agree. Nature loves us; the plants love us. Here are the tools to become better people. I always appreciate Rick Doblin’s statement that people don’t take psychedelics to have psychedelic experiences—they take them to have better human experiences. I think that’s quite right. They don’t call them plant teachers for nothing, Carlos. They have a lot to teach us, and as curious monkeys, we have a lot to learn.

So the odyssey continues. Thank you so much for your time, and I’ll be happy to invite you back one of these days. I hope to see you in Iquitos one of these days.

Carlos Tanner: That would be amazing. Yeah.

Dennis McKenna: Beautiful. Thanks so much again. Take care.

Carlos Tanner: Thanks so much.