Imagine music as a recipe. Would you be able tell whether it had been made with artificially engineered ingredients or fresh produce from the farmer’s market? Canned tomatoes might work just fine—but maybe you wouldn’t know what you had been missing until you tried the same dish with heirlooms, each beautifully misshapen with unique streaks of sunburst yellow.
Before neuroscientist Leanna Standish drank the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca for the first time, she was a steadfast scientific materialist. She was trained to believe—and she did—that everything could be explained by science. Then, much like the pioneering psychedelic researchers who came before her, she had a humbling ayahuasca experience while spending time in Brazil in 2000.
There weren’t many role models for Sam Huynh when she was growing up in Belen, New Mexico. In fact, except for a howling freight train and the surrounding desert mountains, there wasn’t much of anything in the town of 7,000 people.
Despite the fact that psychedelic drugs have been used for millennia as medicine in ritualistic ceremonies, there remain many questions in the scientific community about the relationship between their spiritual qualities and healing potential. Researchers at Johns Hopkins and New York Universities are giving psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to ordained ministers in the hopes that they can help provide some answers.
