“The symposia were not staged, but work in ethnopharmacology continued, and there have been significant discoveries made in the last 50 years.”
Biography
Dennis McKenna’s research has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brasilian Amazon. His doctoral research (University of British Columbia,1984) focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, and was a key organizer and participant in the Hoasca Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by the UDV, a Brazilian religious group. He is the younger brother of Terence McKenna. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.
What a long, strange trip it’s been: Reflections on the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 1967-2017
Transcript abstract
Fifty years have passed since the first ESPD symposium was held in San Francisco in 1967. That seminal conference was intended to be the first in a regular series, but followup symposia were never held due to changing political and cultural circumstances. The symposia were not staged, but work in ethnopharmacology continued, and there have been significant discoveries made in the last 50 years. This lecture will discuss some of the more significant ones, and will speculate as to the future of psycho-ethnopoharmacology in the coming decades.
