A Short, Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon by John O'Connor
Many thanks to Sourcebooks and
NetGalley for the advanced copy of John O’Connor’s fascinating exploratory book
about the life of psychonaut Terrence McKenna, A Short Strange Trip: An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. This was a fascinating book that is hard to categorize as it covers
travel and adventure writing, which are O’Connor’s specialty, but it also
includes elements of biography, memoir, and critical analysis of areas like
mental health care, pharmacology, history, indigenous rights, and equity. In
fact, I was surprised at the scope of the book’s various topics, but it does
somewhat mirror the life and wandering (or maybe wondering) focus of Terrence
McKenna, a man who was neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but seemed to
have an impact on mycology, psychedelics, and even rave culture in the 90s
before his untimely death at age 53 in 2000. I first learned about McKenna from
Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind, where the esteemed food
writer explores the history and influence of psychedelics, especially
mushrooms. I remember the surprise that I hadn’t heard of McKenna before since
he was an advocate for magic mushrooms who proselytized their use for finding
deeper spiritual and philosophical meaning in life. McKenna had a fascinating
life which included a trip to the Amazon in the early 70s chasing psychedelic
plant medicine indigenous people have used for some time, but without much
understanding of the history, reasons or cultural aspects of the uses. O’Connor’s
book paints a detailed portrait of McKenna’s complications, raising questions of
cultural appropriation, questioning whether McKenna’s intentions were genuine
or whether he was just looking to continue exploring psychedelics. Interspersed
within McKenna’s story and pursuit of higher consciousness is O’Connor’s own
exploration of psychedelic therapy for his father, a retired, ivy-league
educated lawyer whose struggle with alcoholism has distanced him from his
family. As a kind of last resort to help his father, O’Connor convinces his
father to try some forms of psychedelic therapy, highlighting the ways in which
psychedelics like LSD, magic mushrooms, and ketamine have been used to treat
addictions and other mental health issues like PTSD. It’s one of the more
heart-felt and humorous parts of the book, with a strangely funny anecdote
about his father’s heroic, McKenna-sized dose of mushrooms that has explosive results.
Nevertheless, what O’Connor’s research into McKenna’s life reveals is that McKenna’s
advocacy for mushrooms may have been empty, despite maintaining a public façade
of support. After a bad trip sometime in the late 80s, he did not use mushrooms
for about 10 years, according to interviews with McKenna’s ex-wife and brother,
Dennis. These interviews, along with others who knew McKenna like anthropologist
Wade Davis present a picture of a talented and enthusiastic psychonaut who lived
much of his life underground, prior to the larger-scale interest and emerging
industries in psychedelics, yet was never accepted by the intellectual or
academic communities where psychedelic studies were building a foundation in
collaboration with areas like medicine, pharmacology, psychology, philosophy,
and religion. McKenna was kind of a like a man out of time, preceding many
popular trends yet maintaining a small, but dedicated following in a field that
has been growing in prominence and popularity.
There’s a lot to like about this
book, especially if you enjoy books about travelling and exploring the jungle,
history, and psychedelics. I remember seeking out Burroughs’ The Yage
Letters for some time to learn more about his quest to locate ayahuasca,
and similarly enjoying the more recent book about exploring the psychedelic
tourist scene in Ernesto Londoño’s book Trippy. O’Connor’s book focuses
primarily on McKenna’s journey to locate a rare plant oo-koo-he, mentioned by
another ethnobotanist, in La Chorrera, an area in the Colombian Amazon.
Instead, McKenna, his brother, and some friends ended up discovering psilocybe
cubensis, a mushroom that led them to conduct a psychedelic experiment. I
give credit to O’Connor for trying to make some sense of McKenna’s experiment
since it’s not really an experiment, but actually a trip that led to some
strange insights. It’s unclear what initiated Terrence’s belief that they might
be able to transcend his consciousness into another dimension, seeing the
mushroom as a kind of vehicle capable of this transportation. I found it
somewhat humorous. Although Dennis seemed to suffer a bout of psychosis as a
result of the heroic dose of mushrooms, this experience launched Terrence’s
career as a psychedelic explorer and cultivator of mushrooms. Interestingly, Dennis
went on to earn a PhD in botanical sciences, and with Terrence, authored a book
on their experiences cultivating psychedelic mushrooms at home, bringing this
species into the US counterculture. I found this part of the book fascinating as
O’Connor recreates the journey through his own experiences traveling the same
areas around the Colombian Amazon. O’Connor not only creates a compelling travelogue
and story of exploration for a region rarely traveled by many Americans.
However, he also raises a critical perspective, noting the region’s infamy as a
site of exploitation by rubber companies in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. Frequently referencing the Belgian exploitation of
the Congo and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, O’Connor details some of the
worst violence and butchery that the indigenous people of these areas faced
from company bosses. O’Connor tells the story of John Brown, an American who
ended up in this region working for a rubber company, who Terrence encounters.
O’Connor’s research raises critiques about Terrence’s dismissal of indigenous
ways while also ignoring or discounting the kinds of atrocities these companies
perpetrated. It’s what leads to the more complicated portrait of Terrence, who
despite being a countercultural liberal, nevertheless remained blinded by some
of his own biases and ethnocentrism.
I really enjoyed reading O’Connor’s
details of both his and McKenna’s journeys, separated by nearly 50 years. He
paints a detailed picture of the jungle terrain, as well as many of the
difficult obstacles and challenges that Westerners might experience trying to
traverse this terrain for the first time. However, I also found myself struck
by the kinds of observations and arguments about ethnocentrism and exploitation
that O’Connor raises. Much like Londoño’s book, O’Connor also notes how the
idea of psychedelic tourism has reshaped the region and created a new economy
that most likely neglects or redefines the kind of plant medicinal work that may
have been a staple for the region for at least a century. I also found it
interesting that O’Connor posits that ayahuasca use may have been the result of
some of the terror and trauma that indigenous people experienced, seeing it as
a medicine to deal with the generational trauma that was inflicted by the exploitation
of the land. It’s something that Terrence didn’t seem to consider, imposing his
own ideas about shamanism and medicinal plants on the Amazon region, which
eventually led to his “stoned ape” theory about the development of
consciousness. Although it’s widely dismissed, O’Connor manages to speak to
some anthropologists and researchers who acknowledge there might be some truth
to the use of psychedelic plants and medicines by our ancient ancestors.
The last section of the book
features a kind of psychedelic conference where Rick Perry, of all people, ends
up speaking. It’s a completely surreal scene that O’Connor manages to detail with
both humor and horror, raising questions about the inclusion of minorities in plant
medicine and sharing their own perspectives about skepticism regarding
institutionalized medicine. He seems to be saying that the rise of these kinds
of alternative medical spaces, where psychedelics have been spilling over into
institutionalized medicine, have failed to be inclusive and continue to exploit
those who not only originated the practices (appropriation), but also are
moving to a kind of commodification of these spiritual and cultural practices
as a means to address our current malaises. It’s something that I need to
consider more, but I found this section of the book to raise some of the most
pointed and important questions that I’ve never considered about psychedelics. Furthermore,
with the recent focus on Ibogaine as a drug of importance for therapeutic purposes,
it is clear that psychedelics and plant medicine are moving more into the
mainstream as both a vehicle for personal exploration and a means of healing past
trauma. O’Connor’s book explores not only the complicated nature of psychedelics
in America since McKenna’s experiment in 1971, but also the fraught history of
exploitation and cultural appropriate of plant medicine for recreational and
personal use, as opposed to more communal, spiritual activities. This book is
hard to classify, but it appeals to many different genres, including memoir,
biography, history, and social criticism. I enjoyed many parts of the book, and
found myself amused by O’Connor’s frequent allusions, which seem to sometimes
manifest out of nowhere. Nevertheless, he makes these trips both entertaining
and emotional. I really want to check out his book on bigfoot (The Secret
History of Bigfoot), which also sounds like it has its own unique journey
and exploration. However, I recommend this book, especially if you are a fan of
reading about plant medicine, psychedelics, and learning more about the
fascinating life of psychonaut Terrence McKenna.
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